Why Teens Ask ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’ And What You Can Actually Do
I was folding Lila’s hoodies on the couch last Tuesday, the dryer still rumbling in the mudroom and her half-eaten bowl of cold mac and cheese sweating on the coffee table, when she paused her TikTok scroll and looked up. “Do people really find life worth living?” she said, like she was asking if we had any more laundry detergent.
My first instinct was to blurt out the default line: Of course they do, honey, how could you ask that? But I stopped. Two months earlier, her best friend Mia had spent a week in the hospital after an overdose, and Lila had been scrolling through more and more videos talking about how all adults just fake being happy to get through the day. I set the hoodie I was holding down and leaned back against the couch. “What made you ask that?” I said.
She turned her phone to show me a poll: 72% of 13 to 18-year-olds voted that they think most adults don’t actually enjoy life, they just pretend. “Look,” she said, “Mr. Henderson my math teacher falls asleep in study hall half the time. My dad works 11 hour days just to pay for the car and the insurance, and he’s too tired to play video games with me on weekends. Why would anyone do that if it’s actually good?”
I get where she’s coming from. Last semester I was subbing in a 10th grade health class, and the same question came up during a mental health unit. Half the kids raised their hand when the teacher asked who thought most adults are miserable. They see the burnout posts online, they hear us complaining about bills and work, and the only other version of life they get is the polished Instagram highlight reel of vacations and promotions that feels totally out of reach for them. They’re not being dramatic. They’re connecting the dots they can see.
The first thing I’ve learned after this coming up with my own kid and in the classroom is to always lead with a safety check. I didn’t dance around it. I said “That makes sense to wonder. Before we talk about it, I have to ask: are you feeling like life isn’t worth it for you right now? Are you hurting enough that you’re thinking about hurting yourself?” It sounds scary to say out loud, but it’s not. Lila blinked, then shook her head fast. “No, I’m fine. I just don’t get it.” That cleared the way to talk, instead of me panicking and her shutting down because I didn’t ask the hard question first.
If your kid says yes to that question, you call their pediatrician or a local counselor that day. No waiting, no overthinking. But if they’re just asking the question out of the confusion most teens feel right now, you don’t have to have a big perfect answer. I used to give the big pep talk about all the amazing things life has to offer, but that never works. It just sounds like a lie, because kids know life isn’t all amazing all the time.
Instead I told her about the week before. I’d spent an hour pulling dandelions out of the back corner of the yard, sweaty and annoyed that I had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon, and I found a whole patch of wild strawberries I’d planted two years ago and totally forgot about. I ate three straight off the vine, still warm from the sun, and they were the sweetest thing I’d eaten all year. That was it. No big moment, just three warm strawberries. I told her most days are like that for me. I spend most of the day folding laundry, dealing with a cranky principal at school when I sub, arguing with the insurance company about a bill. I don’t walk around feeling over the moon about life. I fake a smile for parent-teacher conferences sometimes, too. But there’s almost always one or two small things that make it worth getting through the boring hard parts.
I thought about the English teacher I work with sometimes, when a kid said all adults hate their jobs. He didn’t say he loved every minute. He said “I hate staying up until 10pm grading essays, I hate filling out all these stupid forms the district makes me do. But when you guys argue for 20 minutes about whether the main character was right to leave her town, that’s the good stuff. That makes the rest worth it.” Half the kids in the room looked shocked, like they’d never heard an adult admit the bad parts before.
That’s the mistake we make most of the time. We either pretend life is perfect 24/7, or we complain nonstop about how hard it is, and we never show the middle. We never talk about the small, stupid, unglamorous things that keep us going. After I told Lila about the strawberries, she was quiet for a minute, then said “Remember when I stayed after art club and we painted mugs for the elementary school’s holiday sale? That felt really good. But it was only two hours. Is that enough?” I said “For me, yeah. Some days that’s all you get, and that’s enough.”
She went back to scrolling after that, no big heartfelt moment. But that night when I went to turn off her light, I saw her notebook open on her desk, with a list scrawled in the margin: warm iced coffee from the gas station, my cat sleeping on my feet, when it rains and I don’t have to go anywhere.
We still don’t have a final answer. Some nights Lila will come home from school complaining that everything is stupid and pointless, and I don’t push her to be positive. Some days I feel the same way. I still have to remind myself to look for the small bits, instead of waiting for some big grand reason to keep going. But we stopped faking the big happy answer, and that’s enough for right now. The question doesn’t need to be fixed. It just needs an honest answer.
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