There is lots of positive news out there. Reforestation, garbage patch cleanup, Great Barrier Reef improvement. I’ve started prioritizing finding good news. Normal media channels will just get you depressed.

Yep, we are in a sustained global economic and technological boom that's been going on for decades. If it bleeds it leads is true of almost all news media, it's up to you to find good sources of information. The business news is actually a great source to prioritize as making accurate bets about the world is the most important thing to its readership.

The NYT does a whole section called "The Week in Good News", it's a nice palette cleanser.

https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/the-week-in-good-news

I follow the Good News Network on facebook, it's a good source for positive news, ranging from the small but heart-warming to the hugely important.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/

It's rare that positive news gets reported. It happens, but it's not exciting, generally. "Infant mortality rate in decline for 50th straight year" is great news, but it's not "news".

Instead, we get breathless headlines about shark attacks, which hardly ever happen. Our brains latch on to the wrong things most of the time. The news sucks because our brains suck. They're just giving us what we want.

I suppose it was a random example, but it's unfortunately a very bad one if it's about the USA, like most posts here presuppose.

The infant mortality in the USA certainly did not decline on every recent year[^1]. And the bad news is that this rate is extremely high for a rich country, with a value similar to Serbia, half more than the average rate in Europe[^2]. This last "news" was even reported under the title "Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment"[^3].

[^1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db09.pdf

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...

[^3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/29/our-i...

It's not completely random, although I didn't fact-check absolute specifics like you did. What I'm going to do in response is fact-check long term trends, which was my point.

First site I checked shows that infant mortality in the US fell by about 50% from 1980-2010 (depending on category, but that's the trend in all categories). Someone did a paper on 1926 US infant mortality rates, and current rates are roughly 90% lower.

I'm not comparing to Serbia, or to last year. I'm comparing to decades ago. By focusing on trend rather than momentary detail, I'm seeing the positive where you're seeing the negative.