Bored in Los Alamos, a daily reality for teens
Story by Sal Dewitt
Edited by Ryan Lowery
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
It all began because a Los Alamos High School senior, Libby Nolen, was bored.
“I was just so bored ... so then finally, I was just like, I’m just gonna write a letter to the editor,” she said.
So in April, Libby typed up a letter to the Los Alamos Daily Post detailing an evening when she and some friends searched Los Alamos for something to do. After visiting multiple locations around town in hopes of entertainment, the most excitement the group found was purchasing some candy at Smith’s.
Libby’s heartfelt letter set the community alight, with some expected social media responses. Some respondents were supportive, but others were, in true Los Alamos fashion, derisive: “[T]his generation has much more freedom and choices than ever”; “I’m sad that they think the only thing the Teen Center is good for is video games”; “Good place for churches to step in”; and “Start putting a plan together and take it to a city council meeting.”
Understanding what teens and their parents think
Libby and her friends are bored. But are they alone? To answer that question, and to better understand the struggles teens face, I conducted a survey of local teenagers and their parents in August 2025. It had a mix of multiple-choice and free-response questions, and was shared around the community to net a wide swath of responses. The responses from 132 teens and 84 parents mostly agree that it’s not just Libby and her friends who are bored.
But what is boredom, anyway?
Psychology Today says, “Boredom indicates that a current activity or situation isn’t providing engagement or meaning—so that the person can hopefully shift their attention to something more fulfilling.”
In a paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Dr. Elizabeth H. Weybright wrote that while boredom is common in adolescents, during adolescence, “the increased quest for independence, autonomy, and novelty may create mismatches with limited novel opportunities provided in the social context, especially given slower developing cognitive and regulatory abilities to structure time appropriately. Such mismatches may be associated with threats to optimal health and development.”
Many teens in town said that being a teen in Los Alamos isn’t too bad, but without a car or an interest for constant wilderness exploration, there’s scarce variety in the activities available for teens.
Not a lot of things for us to do here in town. We have the Teen Center and all the local trails and things, but I just wish there were more businesses in town that [have] fun things for young people to do.
—Teen survey respondent
Other teens said it’s depressing living in town because of the pressures that increase in school expectations, or nagging pressures to pursue a career at LANL, which often pushes parent expectations higher. It’s been hypothesized that the lack of activity in town encourages teens to act out, or more commonly to “retaliate” with drug and alcohol use.
We need more things for us kids to do, to keep us engaged and entertained, so that fewer of us have to resort to dangerous, problematic, or other unhealthy things to do due to the fact there is nothing good for us to do.
—Teen survey respondent
What do teens actually want?
A serious lack in this community is that there are few places where teens can get the equivalent of a “third space,” a place that’s away from home and away from grown-ups. If the weather is nice and whatnot, there are places like Ashley Pond to hang out, but the only other place that fits the bill is Smith’s in Los Alamos.
Nobody I’ve met from out of Los Alamos has gone to a grocery store as an activity to do with their friends, but here that’s where everyone goes since there isn’t anything much more interesting.
—Teen survey respondent
Teens also want better transportation and find that, while Los Alamos County offers a free bus system, it’s not necessarily convenient.
“There’s nothing to do in town without cars and waiting for buses, yet when you actually need to take the bus it’s pointless ’cause it’d be faster to walk”
—Teen survey respondent
Another common adult exhortation is that teens need to get a job, and perhaps there’s some truth to that. It’s also true that it’s difficult for teens to get jobs in Los Alamos. With only a handful of businesses willing to hire teens without a work history, all of the teens in town are competing for the same limited number of job opportunities. As with seeking transportation for recreation, getting to and from work can be a problem too.
There aren’t many jobs for teens in Los Alamos, as a parent that’s been a big challenge as kids get older. This is especially true for 14-15 year olds, who are old enough to work with a work permit, but very few places will hire them. They’re too old for camps, yet can’t get hired either.
—Parent survey respondent
What about the Los Alamos Teen Center?
The Los Alamos Teen Center ostensibly exists to address many of the concerns highlighted in my survey of teens. Nearly 80% of survey respondents said they’ve been to the Teen Center near Ashley Pond, and more than half of those teens said they’d been there more than once. It’s a convenient place for teens in the community to buy cheap snacks, play video games, talk to staff members, or simply hang out with friends.
The Los Alamos Teen Center is funded by Los Alamos County and has been run by the YMCA since 2011. With an annual budget of more than $450,000, its stated mission is to “strengthen the self-efficacy and resiliency of community youth through educational support and positive youth development programs.” However, through a public records request, I obtained two years’ worth of the Teen Center’s quarterly reports, which show that, despite increased funding, attendance numbers have been dropping.
The Teen Center has long had issues of how it’s perceived by the audience it’s trying to serve. Many survey respondents, both teens and parents, said the center is an unwelcoming environment that is dominated by cliques and that the center focuses on catering to those tight-knit groups more than others. There’s also a feeling that the Teen Center mainly focuses on younger high school teens, leaving older teens feeling underserved.
Many kids smoke around the Teen Center (not inside as it’s not allowed, but around the area) and I don’t want to be involved in that. I also don’t have any close friends who hang out there.
—Teen survey respondent
The current director of the Teen Center, Eli Argo, who was born and raised in Los Alamos, said it’s been a challenge to get feedback from the larger community of non-members. “We don’t have a way to talk with them,” he said, “The whole thing from Libby was one of the first times that we heard anything recently.”
Kai Pocaterra has been working at the Teen Center for nearly thirteen years and said he thinks some teens have the wrong impression of the center. “They don’t know how much more there is to the Teen Center; you just have to make it your own.” The Teen Center is open to everyone, and he encouraged more teens to come and “carve out their own space and make it whatever they want it to be.”
The Teen Center serves a small and dedicated community of teens, but it seems to have backed itself into a corner. The county, the YMCA, and the community should reconsider the business-as-usual approach and think about new and creative ways to take advantage of the Teen Center’s potential.
Everybody was once a teenager
Libby’s letter also prompted immediate reactions from many local youth-serving organizations. SALA and JJAB responded by holding a roundtable in April, but the only lasting change that seems to have come from that are the weekly free movie nights at SALA. The conversation, though, seems to have faded as quickly as it started.
The survey suggests that teens generally agree that Los Alamos has many redeeming qualities, but it’s hard to engage in the community we feel pushed out of. Los Alamos is a town of scientists where it’s often said to be a “great place to raise kids,” but teenagers are caught in between.
Los Alamos in general also caters to a certain norm — the LANL norm — and teenagers feel this also contributes to the discrimination they experience around town.
Please give teenagers something to do that doesn’t involve making kids feel patronized for being a “teen.”
—Teen survey respondent
“It’s always the elder groups, and it’s always the ones that say, ‘Well, I grew up fine in these rural towns,’” Libby Nolen recounts. Libby’s letter made a push for a conversation about change in Los Alamos to take place.
As cranky old people and retirees resist change, they revert to ways of deflection in retaliation towards changing our community to cater more towards adolescents.
“They’re not always cranky,” Libby said. “Some are great, you know. It’s just when you talk to them about change, they act like change is not normal. Like hey, maybe we should change this, but then there’s the ‘back in my day’ — no, it’s not back in your day anymore; it’s right now.”
“I’m simply trying to share my feelings with the world. Why can you not just use empathy? I’m living right now, not in the 1930s,” Libby said. “Like, everybody was once a teenager.”
There’s (still) no magic bullet
What have I learned? Teens can be selfish; adults can be insensitive. There’s no perfect solution to this problem. The pieces to this puzzle are constantly changing due to our ever-evolving teen culture. We have some things that work, but we can and need to do better as a community. The issue can’t fix itself, and the more we ignore it, the more it grows. Let’s set aside our own biases and try to listen, understand, relate, and discuss with teens so we can start bouncing ideas around in hopes for a solid solution. We need to figure out how to build trust and think creatively.
We teens want to be a part of this community just as much as everyone else. We need help, we need encouragement, and we need authentic support from the heart of the community to help understand what teens need — even if we don’t always know what we need.
Morgan (Sal) Dewitt (sal@boomtownlosalamos.org) is one of Boomtown’s 2025 interns. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, she and her family moved to New Mexico in June 2022. She is currently a junior at Los Alamos High School.