I heard someone say, "Students aren't as smart now as they were five years ago." Someone else replied, "I've been hearing people say that since 1850. People just remember the smart students from before because they stood out, and they forget about the ones who weren't as good."
In another conversation, someone remarked that whether talking to his superiors at work or going home to tell his wife about what is going on at work, he tends to talk about the problems. Saying that people usually like to talk about bad news, he mentioned that when he was watching the news on a local TV station a few days before, they were trying to counter this trend by including positive events in their news coverage. Someone asked him what story they had covered the night he watched it, and he said, "I forgot." His forgetting demonstrated why good news is not covered so much: it doesn't attract attention.
People often talk about how things were better in the good old days.
It seems that in looking at the past, we mostly see the positives, but when looking at the present, we mostly see negatives.
