Why Teens Ask “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?” And What To Do Next
I was scraping congealed pasta sauce off dinner bowls into the compost bin last month when my 16-year-old Lila asked it, casual as she’d ask if we had more laundry detergent. “Do people really find life worth living?”
I froze, a chunk of leftover garlic bread slipping off the plate onto the counter. Our 80-pound golden retriever trotted over and snatched it before I could grab it, and Lila snickered like that was the funniest thing that happened all week. That’s the thing about this question—when teens ask it, it doesn’t always sound like a cry for help. It sounds like a passing observation, pulled from the comment section of a TikTok they just watched.
She leaned against the fridge, phone still in hand, and explained: A friend from art class posted the question to her close friends story, and 27 out of 30 replies said basically the same thing. Most people are just faking it. They get up, go to work or school, pay bills, raise kids, and never actually feel like life is that great. They just don’t say it out loud.
I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and patted the spot next to me. My first instinct was to rush in with the easy, happy answer: Of course it’s worth it! Think of the beach trips, your art, the dog, all the things you have. But that would have been a lie. I still remember the six-week stretch I had last winter, when I was dealing with a bad boss, a broken water heater, and my mom’s first cancer scan. I got up every day just to get Lila to school and get through my meetings. I didn’t stop to notice the dog rolling in grass or sunsets or any of that cheesy stuff people post about. Some days I just wanted to pull the covers over my head and not get up.
So I told her that. I said, “I don’t think anyone feels like it’s worth living every single day. I’ve had whole months where I just go through the motions, and I don’t feel any big joy about being alive. Some days I fake it just to get to the end of the day.”
Lila’s eyebrows went up. She’d never heard me say anything like that. I’ve always been the mom who handles things, who plans the birthday parties and packs the healthy snacks. She said, “So you do fake it too, then?”
I said, “Some days. But the thing is, it’s not all fake most days. It’s just not the big amazing thing they show in movies or on Instagram. Most of the good stuff is tiny. Last Tuesday, I sat in the car after my doctor’s appointment waiting for you to get out of school, and I ate a chocolate chip cookie that was still warm from the bakery down the street. That 10 minutes was worth it, even if the rest of the day was garbage.”
As a volunteer check-in facilitator at Lila’s high school, I hear this question at least once a month. A lot of parents panic the second their kid says something like this, and I get that—you immediately start searching for red flags, wondering if you need to call a counselor right away. The first thing I tell people is to check for those red flags first: have they stopped hanging out with friends, stopped doing things they used to love, talked about hurting themselves or being a burden? If yes, get help immediately. But 8 times out of 10, when a teen asks this, they’re not suicidal. They’re just figuring out that the story we sell them about life is mostly polished for public consumption.
They grow up seeing us post only our best vacations and biggest wins online. They hear us talk about how great adulthood is, how much we love our jobs and our families, and they don’t hear us talk about the boring commutes, the fights with our partners, the days we hate folding laundry and just wish we could run away. So when they feel that boredom or that emptiness themselves, they think they’re the only one. They think everyone else is actually happy and they’re broken.
The concrete thing you can do right when your kid asks this is don’t fix it, just be honest. Instead of giving a speech about how wonderful life is, share one specific bad, mundane day you had that no one else knows about. Instead of saying “it gets better,” say “I cried in the parking lot of Target last week because I forgot the milk and I’d had a terrible day at work, and that’s all I could handle.” Then, if they’re open, ask them to name one tiny thing that didn’t suck this week. It doesn’t have to be big. It can be a good taco, a TikTok that made them snort laugh, their favorite song coming on the radio right when they got in the car.
We did that that night, sitting at the kitchen table while the dog napped under the chair. Lila’s three tiny things were iced coffee that was perfectly sweet, the cat napping on her sketchbook, and the rain stopping in time for our after-dinner walk. Mine was that the plumber finally fixed the leaky faucet that had been driving me crazy for two weeks, and that Lila didn’t fight me about taking out the trash.
We still don’t have a solid answer to the question. Lila still talks about how most of her friends think everyone’s faking it, and I still have days where I think that too. Last week, after my mom’s follow-up scan that came back okay, I still had a day where I didn’t feel like getting out of bed. We don’t have a neat little moral to this story. Some nights we end up listing tiny things again, some nights we just agree no one has the big answer.
The other day I found an open notebook of Lila’s on the counter, and she’d scribbled in the margin: “Most days it’s 50/50, and that’s okay.” That’s where we are right now. It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s ours.
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