[White Owl]

You can't deny that everything that's happened in the past year has been completely fucked.. we've never seen a sequence of events as bizarre as what's happened recently. However, you have to remember that good things still happen.

Humans experience the negativity bias, where negative events in your life take more energy to process than positive ones, and thus have a greater impact than something equally positive. This makes us more biased towards paying attention to negative things even in the light of positive ones.

With the continuous expansion of the Internet, we can access information anywhere on earth, from anywhere on earth. Because of the negativity bias, people from around the world have found that posting about negative and controversial events gives a lot more attention than just posting about positive ones. This floods out positive things from the public eye even more than they already are.

Bad things are happening right now. These are troubling times. But awesome things are happening. Here are a few:
- Technological infrastructure has exploded. Industries that used to stay away from tech have seen its worth with the recent pandemic, and want to become more technologically advanced. The IT sector is booming.
- Working from home, which used to be a foreign concept, is now a pretty normal thing.
- Electric cars and green energy are exploding.
- 2020 saw the highest voter turnout in 120 years.
- Online education has grown significantly.
- The most technologically advanced extraterrestrial vehicle ever constructed landed safely on Mars, and we have real time footage of it landing.

"Online education has grown significantly." that does not mean the level of education has increased, in-fact it actually decreased. According to the Center for Disease Control, the suicide rate and even the rate of hospitalization related to suicide has rose to numbers we have never even seen before. I am in my fourth year of college, since the start of the pandemic, there has been 7 people that I know through college courses kill themselves (2 were childhood friends). I have not dealt with more than two suicides since the start of elementary school, again 7 suicides since just the start of the pandemic alone. Courses are complete ass I haven't learned anything since the pandemic and no one else I know has, in-fact many people simply just dropped out. "The most technologically advanced extraterrestrial vehicle ever constructed landed safely on Mars, and we have real time footage of it landing." That isn't significant to me and also doesn't change anything that is happening down on Earth. In-fact most people probably don't even care as there is people literally sleeping in the street and going hungry at a rate we've also never seen.