1,066 Good News Stories You Didn’t Click On in 2024

Maintaining an accurate perspective on the world takes work—reading this post will help.

Psychologists think that our demeanors are contagious: being around anxious, pessimistic people causes our own moods to tank. Bad news creates a similar phenomenon, with one negative story coloring our perception of other, unrelated events. Good news and cheerful company can have the opposite effect, but the overall battle is tilted toward negativity. As our editor writes, paraphrasing the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker:

Ask yourself, how much happier can you imagine yourself feeling? And again, how much more miserable can you imagine yourself to feel? The answer to the latter question is: infinitely. Psychological literature shows that people fear losses more than they look forward to gains; dwell on setbacks more than relishing successes; resent criticism more than being encouraged by praise.

The media amplifies these tendencies. Thanks to humanity’s evolution, which prioritized threats over all other considerations, negative headlines get more clicks—surely one reason why floundering news outlets are producing more and more of them.

It doesn’t help that most good news is not news at all. Everyone knows that thousands of pilots land safely every day, but the next dramatic plane crash will shock us and command our attention. Ironically, progress contributes to this aspect of our negativity bias. Bad things—like disaster deaths, racial intolerance, and, of course, airline accidents—have become more interesting precisely because they have become more unusual.

All this means that, while rational optimism about the world is the more realistic viewpoint to hold, maintaining such a perspective is a constant, uphill struggle. Below is our latest contribution to that valuable endeavor: a list of all the good news we could round up in 2024. And it’s not saccharine stuff, but meaty feats of human ingenuity, heartening trends, and plain good luck.