Every night I sleep on a mattress, with warm blankets, next to a window with heavy curtains, in a temperature-controlled room, in a house with no drafts, in a safe neighborhood, in a prosperous city.

I could list that out in more detail, but the point is that I try to keep things in perspective when I'm trying to fall asleep or when I'm down on life in general. I get to sleep in circumstances that were out of reach of all of humanity (and all life) anywhere for scores of thousands of years. Circumstances that are still out of reach for billions of humans today.

And I'm not even particularly unusual on the bell curve! I've slept outdoors or on the floor or in other uncomfortable circumstances before, but it's been mostly by choice. And there are so many commonplace luxuries around me that it's essentially a fish-noticing-the-water scenario.

The world I live in today (in the midwestern United States) is so drastically different from the world my grandfather was born into nearly a century ago that it's borderline unrecognizable science fiction. Not just in terms of smartphones and jet aircraft, but in a thousand commonplace things like dishwashers, radio, affordable protein sources, urban infrastructure, access to information, and on and on.

The world is doing empirically better today than it has been at any point in history, by just about any metric you can imagine. Even our problems tend to be signs of things going better, though that's better left for another time.

If you're reading this, look around and find five things you have today that you couldn't have had a hundred years ago. It will improve your Wednesday, or any day, I promise.