A teenager who isn't interested in anything: what lies beneath

“So what are you actually interested in?”

The question lands at dinner, somewhere between the potatoes and the silence. It is not the first time his mum has asked. Before it, she has listed everything that has already been tried: handball, which he gave up after half a year; the guitar standing in the corner; robotics, which he went to for as long as his friend did. The fifteen-year-old looks down at his plate and says the thing parents least want to hear: “Nothing.”

That “nothing” can frighten a parent more than a rebellious answer. Rebellion at least has a direction — it is against something. “Nothing” sounds like an emptiness with nothing in it to hold on to. In this post I want to write about that emptiness: about the teenager who cannot find anything that draws him in, and about what may lie underneath. I wrote about why a teenager cannot be bothered with anything, and how to tell tiredness, resistance and distress apart, in A teenager with no drive: laziness, resistance or distress?. Here I am interested in a different question: how interest comes into being, and what a parent can do when it is not there (yet).

“Nothing” is an answer, not a fact

First, something that often reassures parents: in a teenager, “I’m not interested in anything” is rarely an accurate description of his inner state. More often it is an answer to a question he heard as a judgement. When his mum asks what he is interested in, what he often hears is: “Why aren’t you like the others, who have hobbies, goals and plans?” To that question, “nothing” is the shortest way out of the conversation.

Second, we adults like to imagine that by fifteen young people ought to know what they enjoy. Research does not support this. The Stanford psychologist William Damon and his colleagues spent several years following young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-six, asking them what mattered to them in life and why. By his findings, only around one in five had a clearly formed sense of direction — something they were working towards steadily and that reached beyond themselves. Most were somewhere in between: with a few interests that had no firm shape yet, or with none at all.

Damon did not conclude that something was wrong with young people. He concluded that purpose develops over a long time, usually in relationship with others, and that it cannot be ordered on demand. A teenager who does not know what he wants at fifteen is therefore in the majority, not the minority.

First, rule out what is not a lack of interest

Before we go looking for interests, it is only fair to say when “I’m not interested in anything” means something else. If a teenager has never had strong interests, that is one story. If things used to bring him joy and no longer do — friends, games, music, food — that is a different story, and it needs to be taken seriously.

Losing pleasure in things that used to make you happy has a name: anhedonia. I have written more about it in Anhedonia: when nothing brings joy any more. In young people it is one of the important signs of depression, which often shows up not as sadness but as irritability, withdrawal, poorer sleep and a sense that everything is pointless. How to tell it apart from ordinary ups and downs is something I described in Teenage depression: telling it apart from ordinary mood swings.

So start with three questions. Is the change new — the last few weeks or months? Has he withdrawn from his friends too, not only from activities you chose for him? Has anything else changed: sleep, appetite, grades, the way he talks about himself? If the answer to several of these is yes, this post is not the first step. The first step is a conversation with your family doctor or paediatrician.

Identity is also built in the emptiness

If there is no depression, “I’m not interested in anything” is often part of something typical of adolescence: the search for identity. Erik Erikson described this period as the time when a young person first seriously asks who they are, apart from what others have told them about themselves. The psychologist James Marcia developed this idea into four states, separated by two questions: is the young person exploring the options, and has he already committed to anything?

For parents, the most interesting box in this diagram is the top right one. A teenager who is “decided” because others decided for him looks mature from the outside. He goes to classes, has a timetable, knows where he will apply. But if he has never explored, he may later, at twenty or thirty, suddenly find himself facing a question he never asked: is this even mine? A teenager who is now circling around “nothing” may be closer to that question than it seems.

Exploring, after all, looks messy. It means starting and stopping, getting excited and getting disappointed. The guitar in the corner is not necessarily a failure. It can be information: not this. And every “not this” is a piece of the answer to the question: then what?

How interest actually develops

As parents we often assume that interest is something a child either has or does not have — a kind of inner trait that simply needs to be discovered. The researchers Suzanne Hidi and Ann Renninger have shown a different picture. In their model, interest grows in four phases, and in the first two it is not inside the child at all, but between the child and their surroundings.

• The spark. Something suddenly catches attention — a teacher who can tell a story, a video, a friend who is doing something.
• Holding on. Attention stays if someone or something supports it: a group, an adult who shows the next step, enough challenge without too much failure.
• An interest of one’s own. The young person starts coming back to the thing on their own, asking questions, looking things up.
• A deep interest. They know enough to put up with the boring and difficult parts too, because the thing matters to them.

This means something very practical. If we expect a teenager to “find something he enjoys by himself”, we are expecting him to skip the first two phases — the ones in which interest lives off other people. Most interests that later seem deeply personal began with someone: a coach who believed in them, a friend who dragged them along, a neighbour who showed them his workshop. In the beginning, interest is often more a relationship than a trait.

The developmental psychologist Reed Larson, who spent a long time studying how young people spend their days, found something similar. He noticed that teenagers are often bored at school, while in their free time they are relaxed but rarely truly focused. The rare states in which both are present at once — intrinsic motivation and concentration — he found mainly in voluntary activities with some structure: in a group, with an adult mentor, with a goal the young person had accepted as their own. That, in his view, is where what he called initiative develops.

This also raises a question we parents do not like to hear: what kind of environment do we have at home? This is not about guilt. It is about whether a teenager sees adults who are genuinely interested in something — not because they have to be, but because they want to be. Children do not learn curiosity from lectures about curiosity.

Why “find yourself a hobby” does not work

When a parent is frightened by the “nothing”, they usually do one of two things. Either they start offering — courses, clubs, camps, instruments — or they start pushing: “You’ll pick something by the end of the month.” Both come from love and worry. Both have a trap.

An offer that comes too quickly and in too large a quantity says: your interest is my project. A teenager who is at a stage of looking for space of his own may resist exactly that — not the music or the sport, but the fact that once again someone else has decided for him. Pressure, meanwhile, turns interest into obligation, and obligation is the opposite of curiosity. Research on intrinsic motivation, briefly summarised in the entry motivation, consistently shows that control and external rewards often reduce interest in a thing rather than increase it.

There is also a third, quieter trap. Some teenagers say “I’m not interested in anything” because they are afraid they would not be good enough at anything. If, at home or at school, only what is excellent counts, it is safer not to start at all — then you cannot be average. This pattern is closer to perfectionism than to apathy; there is more about it in Perfectionism in teenagers: when grades are the only measure of worth. How a teenager sees himself is also shaped by how we see him — I wrote about this in Self-image in the teenage years: what parents can do.

And finally, screens. A teenager who “does nothing” often spends hours watching videos or playing games. We parents like to read this as proof that nothing interests him. Sometimes that is true: the phone fills the emptiness and delivers a quick, brief sense of reward, next to which everything else feels slow and dull. Why this happens is explained in Why starting is hard and keeping going is harder: what dopamine says about motivation. When a screen becomes a problem is covered in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem? But underneath the screen there is often an interest we cannot see: in history he is learning through a game, in video editing, in music he listens to for hours. Before you declare the screen the enemy, ask him what he is watching there. And listen to the answer.

What a conversation that opens things up sounds like

With teenagers, conversations about interests almost never happen where we plan them. They do not happen at the table when we ask, “So what are you interested in?” They happen in passing, in the car, alongside something else. Here is an example of how it might sound (composite, not a real person):

Dad: “That video you were watching yesterday… the one with the bridges. What was that?”
Son: “Nothing. Some guy who builds model bridges and then loads them to see when they collapse.”
Dad: “And when do they?”
Son: “Depends. Triangles hold more. But not the ones made from a single piece.”
Dad: “I didn’t know that. Will you show me when you’ve got time?”
Son: “Maybe.”

The father did not ask whether he wanted to study civil engineering. He did not say, “See, something does interest you after all.” He did not suggest a course. He was curious about what his son was already doing, and he stayed there. That “maybe” at the end is, in teenage language, often quite close to “yes”.

Exercise: a week of curiosity instead of a week of suggestions

If conversations about interests at home keep going round in a “what are you into — nothing” loop, try one week differently. The exercise is for you, not for your teenager.

1. For one week, suggest nothing. No club, course or “why don’t you try”. If one slips out, it doesn’t matter — just notice it.
2. Watch where his attention stops. Not where it should stop, but where it actually does: at which topic, video, conversation, with which friend. Write down three things.
3. Ask one curious question about one of them. Not “why are you watching that”, but “how does that work” or “what do you find interesting about it”. Then listen and do not add a lesson.
4. Show him something that interests you. Not as an example, but as an invitation: “I’m going to see an exhibition, want to come?” If he says no, that is a fine answer.
5. At the end of the week, write down what you learned. Not about what he ought to be doing, but about who he is. It is often more than you have learned in the past few months.

The exercise will not turn your teenager into an enthusiastic musician overnight. But it changes something else: the question about interests stops being an exam and becomes a conversation again.

What we see when we look at the whole family

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we do not see a teenager’s behaviour as a trait of one person, but as part of a pattern that lives in the family. Christian Gostečnik describes how an emotional atmosphere the family cannot put into words often finds expression through one of its members — and a teenager, because of the sensitivity of this stage of development, is especially open to carrying it.

What might this mean for the “nothing”? It often turns out that a teenager’s emptiness is not his alone. In some families, being interested in anything that is not useful has quietly been treated as a luxury. In others, one parent has been living in a tiredness with no room for joy for a long time, and the teenager unconsciously stays close to it — as if it would be disloyal to get excited while things are hard at home. In others still, so many expectations rest on one child that another prefers not to try anything at all.

This does not mean parents are to blame. It means it is sometimes worth asking: and what am I still genuinely interested in? When did I last do something just because I enjoyed it? The answer to that question is sometimes more connected to the teenager’s “nothing” than any course. A simple tool can help here, the personal values list, which each of you can fill in separately and then talk about what you noticed.

When conversations at home get stuck and your teenager seems to be falling ever more silent, family therapy, where we all talk together, can help. I described how this works with a young person who does not speak in When a teenager goes quiet: how family therapy opens the conversation.

Where this explanation falls short — and when to seek help

Everything I have written assumes that the teenager is basically all right and is searching. That assumption does not always hold, and it is only honest to say where the limits of this view lie.

• When it is not searching but loss. If things used to bring a teenager joy and no longer do, if he has withdrawn from friends and his sleep or appetite has changed, it may be depression. Patiently waiting for a spark is not the right answer here.
• When he has difficulties you cannot see. A lack of interest can be the result of attention difficulties, learning difficulties or an experience of bullying that makes him withdraw from groups. These are worth checking with the school counselling service.
• When the emptiness comes from exhaustion. A teenager with a schedule that has no breaks cannot develop an interest, because he has no time to be bored. And boredom is often the space in which a spark is born.
• When he talks about nothing making sense, including life. This is no longer a question of interests. Talk to him openly and seek help the same day.

For the teenager himself, the first doors are the family doctor or paediatrician, the school counselling service, or a therapist who works with children and adolescents. In Slovenia, young people can call the TOM helpline free and anonymously on 116 111. If a teenager talks about suicide or is self-harming, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112. How to respond to self-harm is something I described in Self-harm: what it really means and how to respond.

What to remember

• “I’m not interested in anything” is often an answer to a question the teenager heard as a judgement — not an accurate description of his inner world.
• Only a minority of young people have a clear sense of direction in adolescence; searching is the rule, not the exception.
• If things used to bring your teenager joy and no longer do, first check whether it might be depression.
• At first, interest is not born inside a teenager but between him and the people around him — the spark often comes from someone.
• Curiosity about what he is already doing opens more than yet another suggestion about what he ought to be doing.