Think of something you would call good.

Now think of something you would call bad.

I once had to do a series of interviews for a speech class and I asked about 25 people this exact question. I found it very interesting that no matter the order I asked the two questions, people usually were quicker to find a thing that was bad in the world. Now maybe it was just a small sample size that had a good deal of coincidences but nevertheless it made me think.

I looked into things and in the english language, it turns out, we have an innate bias towards negative things. Why? It's because we have more words for negative emotions than we do positive ones.

Not to say that everyone is inherently negative about the world. I just found it interesting that it is universally easier for english speakers to talk about the bad in the world than it is to talk about positive things.

Two weeks ago I wrote an article titled "Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words?" (which happened to become my most shared article yet) and in it I talked about emotions and how we talk about them and the nature of love. I drew colorful analogies to show in words what certain emotions felt like. But in the end I pointed out that the important thing to remember was that words can only go so far. That at the end of the day it's up to us to decide how we see and feel things.

And the world is what we make it. If we only see the bad in the world, only focus on the bad things that are happening, then we will see the world as an evil, hate-breeding, place where nothing good exists. I see it every day in the mainstream media (and believe, me I could write an entire novel on why I don't like them). They focus on the bad and highlight only negative things about our country but fail to give the full facts on things.

There are incredible acts of kindness and bravery that happen every day in the world that are overshadowed by the media who want to throw in our faces the very isolated tragedies that occur. If we all would just take a second to stop and look at the good in the world, instead of the bad, we would see that the world, and our country, are, in reality, really good places.

And sadly we don't do this, we focus on the bad.

Not to say that we shouldn't recognize what's wrong in the world, it deserves at least a small place in our minds. But focusing explicitly on them won't do any good. Doing so will only serve to drive us as a people farther apart when we should be trying to work harder and to work together to make the world a better place.

In short: there is a great deal of tragedies that happen every day in our world. Conversely there is also a great deal of humanity and bravery and acts of heroism that are often overlooked in the face of atrocities. We need to see the world for the good and still keep room in our minds to recognize the bad so we can learn from our mistakes to help prevent them in the future. But only looking at the bad will cause us as a whole to be more negative.

We can never see a positive tomorrow if we see today as negative.