This Thanksgiving, be grateful for these 6 ways the world is getting better

Here are some things to be thankful for this holiday season.

A lot of Americans are bummed out this Thanksgiving. Maybe the recent presidential election didn’t go the way you wanted it to. Perhaps you’re still sad about the deaths of Prince and David Bowie. Maybe you can’t believe Pretty Little Liars only has half of a season left.

But in all this bad news, it’s easy to forget that the world is generally getting better.

That can be hard to believe at times, but it’s true. By several metrics, people around the world are living better, healthier, happier lives.

Here are just six examples. This is by no means a comprehensive look at the world. But the examples suggest that as harrowing as 2016 has felt at times, a lot of things really are improving.

1) People are living longer than ever

For much of human existence, life was miserable — full of laborious work, only to end relatively quickly. It’s only recently that this has changed across the world, with global life expectancy rapidly increasing from below age 30 prior to the 1870s to more than 71 in 2015. There are a lot of reasons for this shift, including shrinking poverty, fewer big wars, and enormous medical advances that have exterminated killer diseases. But it’s a welcome sign of all the progress we’ve made in recent years.

2) Global poverty has plummeted

As people are living longer lives, they’re also much less likely to live in poverty. In 1990, 35 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty, meaning they made less than $1.90 a day. In 2013, only 10.7 percent did. This has been driven by the incredible economic growth the world has seen in the past few decades, particularly in giant countries like China and India. As my colleague Dylan Matthews points out, there’s still a lot of work left to get that number down further, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. But the global gains are still remarkable.

3) Fewer people are going hungry

In large part thanks to the economic growth present in the poverty statistics, the number of people going hungry has fallen dramatically since the 1990s. From 1990 to 1992, nearly 1 billion people in the developing world were undernourished. Today, the number is at 780 million, according to the United Nations. So while this is far from a resolved issue, it’s at least an issue we’re making progress in.

4) Polio is close to extinction — and other diseases have been nearly eliminated as well

Another reason people are living longer: Many deadly diseases are slowly going extinct. This is in large part thanks to the advent of vaccines, which gave us a much-needed way to fight previously untreatable or hard-to-treat diseases. Polio is one example, with no new cases of polio occurring over the past few years in all but a handful of countries. But it’s not just polio: Vaccines also helped entirely wipe out smallpox and rinderpest around the world and nearly eradicated diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, and tetanus, among others, in the US. It’s not something you think about every day, but vaccines could be the reason you’re still alive today.

5) War is on the decline

Much of the world used to be filled with the constant threat of war, from the Roman conquests to the Mongol invasions to the world wars. Today, those kinds of threats are vanishingly rare. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explained, much of that has to do with the spread of democracy, nuclear weapons creating deterrents to conventional war, and increased respect for nations’ sovereignty discouraging wars of conquest:

Whatever the explanation, the result is people are no longer anywhere nearly as likely to die in war. Events that once crippled entire generations are now thankfully rare.

6) US crime is near historic lows

Meanwhile, crime in America and many other wealthy nations has plummeted over the past couple of decades. The funny thing is criminologists aren’t really sure why this happened — although there are theories (ranging from “tough on crime” policies deterring more crime to less lead in gasoline making people less violent), there is no single explanation that experts have come around to. One caveat is the FBI found that murder rates — and violent crime, albeit less so — ticked up in 2015, although no one is quite sure why this is the case either. Still, the end result is all the same: Crime is near historic lows.

Again, all of these statistics don’t mean the world is perfect. There’s still plenty of work to do in several of these areas, there’s still a lot of inequality in the gains we’ve seen (particularly based on geography, nationality, ethnicity, and race), and there are other threats that we should remain wary of, from terrorism to global warming.

But these broad measures show the world is broadly getting better. We are not only generally living longer, but our lives are less likely to be hampered by poverty, hunger, disease, war, and crime than before.