Everything in "life" is stated flatly, as if it were obvious, and that calm is what unsettles. The speaker doesn't confess but diagnoses. "We are all just / sleep-deprived teenagers": the word "just" shrinks everyone, adults included, to the same tired, unfinished state. Sleeplessness is an ordinary complaint, but judging by what follows, it hints at something heavier, such as nights spent awake with one's thoughts. Then comes "going on," alone on its line. It can mean "continuing" or simply "happening," and either way life here is endured rather than lived, "the life we didn't choose to live."
The central idea is that happiness has become a performance, and a good enough one to fool the performers. The second half of the poem tracks how far the act reaches. First comes laughing at jokes "to make people believe we are alive." The laughter exists to supply evidence, and the verb "believe" matters: the aim is not to be alive but to be believed to be. Being alive has turned into something to prove.
The next image is stranger: music "that doesn't want to make us die." It is odd to praise music by saying it doesn't kill you. Music is usually supposed to console or lift, but here the bar is set at survival. The phrase also personifies the music, giving it a will that could have gone the other way. In a poem so quiet, this is the most frightening line, and it says nothing loudly.
Then the angle shifts. "All convinced we're happy inside" moves from deceiving others to deceiving ourselves. "Convinced" suggests someone did the persuading, and the only candidate is the speaker's own effort. "Inside" removes the last refuge, since the mask isn't dropped even in private. The final clause, "even though we all have a reason / to cry," leaves the reason unnamed. That restraint lets each reader supply their own, and it keeps the poem from becoming a case history.
The construction supports this tone. It is free verse in lowercase, a single sentence held together by commas and a semicolon until the full stop after "cry." That run-on shape sounds like a tired murmur. The lines are short and the longest sits mid-poem ("in the life we didn't choose to live"), and then they thin out until "to cry" is left alone, a drop of two syllables. The participles "laughing," "listening," and "convinced" read like a daily routine, a list of habits rather than events. "All" keeps returning ("we are all," "all convinced," "we all have"), a chorus-like repetition. The speaker never says "I," so no one is singled out as the sufferer.
Rhyme is almost absent, which makes its one appearance count. "Die" and "cry" chime near the end, and the click of the matching sounds feels like a lock closing on the poem's two darkest words. Even that rhyme sits inside a wider pattern. The long "i" sound runs through "deprived," "life," "alive," "die," "inside," and "cry." Those are the poem's words for living, dying, and hiding, and the shared sound blurs the boundaries between them.
The poem is signed "escape_artist." If that is a chosen pen name, which I can only infer, it fits the poem well. An escape artist performs for an audience, and the trick is getting free. The people in this poem perform constantly, but the "life we didn't choose" is the trap, and no one escapes it.
Its significance lies in giving a vague, widely shared weariness exact language without melodrama. It offers no cure and no moral, and it does not tell the reader to cheer up. What it does offer is "we." By insisting that everyone is acting, it suggests that the loneliness of the act is itself shared. A reader who has laughed on cue may recognise themselves in these lines and feel slightly less alone.