You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the results are dramatic.
Take child mortality for example. In the 18th century, the average family suffered the deaths of 3-4 of their children before they reached adulthood.
Then, from 1800 to 1950, global childhood mortality dropped from 43% to 22%.
Accelerating further, from 1950 to 2015, global child mortality dropped again by nearly 5X to just 4.5%. And it's still going down. [1]
The reasons for this are numerous. Reductions in famine through agriculture, beating disease with medicine, reducing War through economic interdependency, expanding education and access to information through digital technology, etc. While we make mistakes in the short term , in the long term, we tend to get stuff right.
The problem is, we're also really good at getting distracted by bad news stories while missing the big picture. And we LOVE the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world for some reason. It's the basis of most of our religions.
Of course, the arc of progress is paved with setbacks. But before getting pessimistic and cynical because you read some bad news stories, it pays to zoom out a little.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#:~:text=Across%20....