There’s lots of seemingly bad news every day.
But there’s always been bad news.
And now with more bandwidth available, I think we’re just taking taking in more info. Then combine that wit the human bias toward the negative that comes baked in to help with survival during our millennia spent in the wild as hunter gatherers.
The world’s population will begin trending downward sometime in the next decades.
Most people are unaware of the positive changes in our world. Read Hans Roling’s book “Factfulness” and you’ll see that even the folks who should know about positive trends don’t know about them. You’ll be surprised.
Educating women leads to women having less children.
Cities are more efficient than country living and so are effectively “greener.”
Most poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration rather than  redistribution or philanthropy.
Think about this rapid change. In 1949, 75% of Chinese women were illiterate. But today China has one of the lowest rates of female illiteracy in the world — as well as the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires.
There’re lots of positive things happening, but they’re generally overshadowed by the negative news we constantly get.