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How much of your current view of the world, humanity and your future is being shaped by negative news?
One of my go-to blog sites is Positive Psychology News because they provide great articles with the latest scientific research into what impacts our potential to live more happy, flourishing, meaningful and prosperous lives.
This post from Henry Edwards explores the negative consequences we can experience from being constantly fed negatively biased news through mainstream media.
I grew up in an era where it was habitual for us to sit together as a family at 6:00pm to watch the nightly TV news, and then we would move from the lounge to the dining table to eat a family meal and discuss the news of the day.
Liz and I made a conscious decision that as our children were growing up, certainly in their pre-teen years, we didn’t want the negatively biased news impacting their view of the world so we rarely had the news on when the kids were young because it basically is biased to be just telling us about all the bad news… with an occasional good news panda story.
Our sons, now young adults, rarely watch mainstream news. Like so many of the post baby-boomers, their news feed is via social media and they get to pick and choose the stories they want to watch and learn more about.
The reality is, as highlighted in Henry Edwards’ article, “According to scholars like Steven Pinker at Harvard and Max Roser at Oxford, we live in the best time in history. Just as crime has fallen, so too have rates of HIV infection, homelessness, extreme poverty, war, murder, youth drug use, underage drinking, smoking, air pollution, and hunger. At the same time, many of the good things in life have been on the rise, including longevity, high school graduation rates, educational attainment, vaccination rates, access to mobile phones, democracy, transportation, and human rights.”
Sure there’s some serious stuff that still needs fixing, but I recommend you take a moment to consider how much your current view of the world, humanity and your future is being shaped by bad news.