Why Your Teen Is Asking “Is Life Really Worth Living?” And What You Can Do
I was folding Leo’s pile of sweaty soccer hoodies on the couch last Tuesday, my leftover chamomile tea steeping for the second time, when he looked up from his phone and asked it plain: “Do people really find life worth living?” The microwave beeped right as he finished, covering the last word for a second, like even the house wasn’t sure it wanted to hear the answer.
I almost blurted the automatic response I’ve heard a hundred times: Of course it is! What a silly question. But I stopped. I work as a high school counselor, and I’ve heard that exact question three times in the last month from students on my caseload. I know the automatic answer is the wrong one.
Leo leaned back against the armrest and explained he’d been scrolling TikTok, watching creators talk about how everyone is just faking it. Adults work 40 hours a week at jobs they hate, pay rent for closet-sized apartments, eat sad takeout for dinner, and post vacation photos pretending they’re happy. He pointed out that his soccer coach complains about his mortgage at every practice, my sister complains about her toddler nonstop, and I complain about grading midterms and broken copy machines at school. So what’s the point? Are we all just lying to get through the day?
I sat down next to him, didn’t pause the bad reality TV I had on in the background, didn’t make it a big formal “we need to talk” moment. I said, “I wonder that sometimes too.” He blinked, like he expected a lecture. I told him I don’t have a big, fancy, yes-or-no answer. Some days I drag myself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. just to deal with schedule conflicts and jammed printers, and I don’t think life feels particularly worth it that day. That’s just true.
The first thing I tell parents and new teachers who ask me about this question is that it’s not automatically a crisis. If your kid mentions hurting themselves or having a plan to end their life, you get help immediately, no questions asked. But more often than not, when a teen asks this, it’s just them growing up. It’s the first time they’re able to think abstractly, to question all the unspoken rules adults just accept without thinking. It’s normal, not a sign you messed up.
The worst thing you can do is rush to fix it. I’ve seen so many people immediately respond by listing all the good things in the kid’s life to prove them wrong: But you have soccer! You have your friends! We go on vacation every year! That just makes the kid feel like you’re not listening, like their question is wrong, so they’ll stop asking you next time. Last semester, a 10th grader on my caseload told me she asked her mom this same question, and her mom shut it down by saying she was just being dramatic. She didn’t bring up any of her anxious thoughts to her mom again for two months.
Instead, start by being honest about your own unpolished experience, not the curated version you post online. I told Leo that for me, life isn’t worth it because of the big moments—my college graduation, our family trip to the Grand Canyon, those are fine, but they don’t stick with me the way the small stuff does. It’s the 5 minutes we have in the morning before school when we stop for iced coffee and don’t talk about homework or tests. It’s when he burns toast and laughs so hard he drops half of it on the kitchen floor. It’s when a former student emails me to say something I said helped them get through a hard year. None of that is big, none of it gets posted online, but that’s the stuff that adds up.
Then I did a tiny, low-effort exercise I’ve started using with students and with my own kid: I asked him to grab his notes app and list three tiny things from the last week that felt worth it, even just a little. He rolled his eyes and said it was dumb, but he did it. First he put “al pastor tacos from the food truck by the library last Tuesday.” Then “the new Zelda update that didn’t suck.” Then “Jake facetimed me for an hour from Portland last weekend.” By the end he had seven things, all smaller than a tournament win or a birthday party. It takes two minutes, you can do it while you’re driving or waiting for dinner to cook, no big therapy session required.
For teachers who get this question after class or in homeroom, you don’t have to be a licensed therapist to respond well. You don’t have to send them straight to the counseling office unless they mention harming themselves. You can just say, “That’s such a fair question, I think about that too. Let’s talk for five minutes after class” instead of brushing it off as teen moodiness. Most kids just want someone to admit the question isn’t crazy, not someone to fix it for them.
After we finished the list, Leo went back to his TikTok, I went back to folding the hoodies. We didn’t fix existentialism that night. He still posts gloomy tweets about how boring adult life is, he still forgot to turn in his AP bio homework last week. I still worry sometimes, that the constant noise online telling him life has to be extraordinary or it’s worthless makes it harder for him to see the small, good stuff right in front of him. But he asked the question out loud, and he didn’t get a canned answer back. That’s more than a lot of kids get. Some days, that feels like enough.
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