Because the news tends to focus on negative events, one of the things you probably do in the morning is read about the most distressing occurrences that took place worldwide in the past 24 hours. This can give you the impression that the world is a sad and dangerous place, but it's actually a problem of limited sampling.
Although this phenomenon is not new—the saying "if it bleeds, it leads" has been around as long as newspapers have existed—there is a new aspect to it due to the constant exposure we have today. Instead of simply reading the morning paper or watching the news in the evening, many people now compulsively check for the latest atrocities every few minutes. They also receive forwarded articles from well-meaning friends, which further incentivizes sensationalist media to produce an endless stream of emotionally and mentally toxic content.
The media tends to exaggerate minor flaws and inefficiencies in our otherwise remarkable modern civilization, presenting them as existential disasters and oppressive systems. Even the relatively minor inconveniences of life in the 21st century are portrayed as hardships comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor combined.
Consequently, some of the most privileged and safest individuals in human history are led to perceive themselves constantly as threatened victims engaged in a desperate battle against an oppressive regime. They literally fear for their lives while walking the streets, despite the fact that, by any rational historical standard, we live in a nearly utopian society. :)
From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]:
Learning Is an Active Process
Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just
because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the
learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners
need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually.
This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful:
"For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." [1]
There's no single cause and no single cure which is why it's so hard.
I moved cities at 10 years old, and was bullied and isolated during the entirety of Middle School. Ever since then, I've always had negative and depressive thoughts lurking around. It's just my normal.
A psychiatrist helped me understand that those formative years are when your cortex is developing. The cortex learns through repetition, and during those years I was having constant sadness and suffering events. So, my emotional intelligence learned to be that way and that's why I've suffered ever since.
If I'm not pro active in thinking about being happy or doing active things, I default to being depressed. After almost 20 years, I'm still suffering.
A side effect of being isolated during those years is my social skills have taken longer to develop. I didn't have a true batch of friends until college, but now I've lost all of them.
This reminds me of the “no hello” proposal for workplace chat messages (e.g. https://nohello.net/). It’s much less of a big deal for personal communication, but I can understand wanting someone to just say what they want to say without a manual SYN/ACK first.
While this spreadsheet and formulas are useful I found taking an Intro to Finance course to be more useful. Especially, because I have a purely engineering background
Netflix does an impressive job of hiding from you 90%+ of what it has available if it's algorithm decides you are not interested in those genres.
However, there are plenty of sites out there that have compiled links to the thousands of genres that Netflix have categorised everything into. For example:
https://java-design-patterns.com/