[Pbever]

"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.

This was my entire argument. You cannot expect to be happy when you have something positive and only choose to pick out the negatives.

I think the negativity is far more emphasized in the news cycle. Go on to any news website for example, look at all of the headlines. The majority of them will be written in a way to provoke a negative response from you. Unfortunately, this is the news that sells, the people running these media conglomerates aren't stupid, they write them in this way because they know it will give them the highest profits. When there's such a high ratio of negative to positive news stories, with many of these negative stories leaving more of an impression on you in comparison, it's easy to forget the positivity. It feels as if you have to be specifically looking for positive news. Surely this constant cycle isn't ideal for people's mental health.

tl;dr: for every positive or uplifting story in the news, there are many more negative stories, which often take up more headline space. We, not necessarily by choice, tend to think of or remember the things that elicit a negative emotional response.