Ben Carlson

If you look at, they do these annual happiness readings, and from 1970 to 2020, it was up and down a little bit, but essentially the same.

And then it falls off a cliff in the pandemic, and it has never come back.

So I actually think...

this is gonna sound weird to say, it's a sign of progress because we didn't go through world wars and depressions and such and these things that people in the past were more used to dealing with.

And I think that shock to the system that we had, it's like, oh my gosh, this thing that we thought this only happened in history books,

I think it's actually a sign of progress that we're, like luxuries have become necessities to us.

And we are, I don't want to say we're more pampered than the past, but things are a little easier for us than they were for previous generations.

And I think that shock to the system was something that we as a society were not equipped to deal with.

And now we're seeing the ramifications of that, that it's completely changed the sentiment readings and thrown them off so much that it's hard to trust them anymore.

I think it's really hard to avoid the fire hose of negativity these days.

And I'm personally a glass is that full person.

And it's hard to be optimistic when there's so much negativity that surrounds everything these days.

And part of it is everything is politicized and there's politics and there's social media and all these things.

And I just, I'm not sure that our brains have evolved enough to deal with

I don't think enough people have a filter in place to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

I think that's really, really hard on your psyche when you're constantly just bombarded with all the bad stuff that happens.

In the past, bad stuff happened all the time too, but people didn't hear about it on a 24-7 basis with alerts from their phones all the time.

Yeah.

So piggybacking on that, in our own community, they're talking about having smaller classroom sizes and even having some layoffs at our local schools.

We live in a pretty good school system.