2025 felt like a disaster — but the numbers tell a very different story

2025 is just about in the books, and the reviews are in: It sucked.

Over at the subreddit r/decadeology, you can check out a long, long thread of redditors submitting reasons why 2025 was, in the words of the first post, “a long, disappointing year.” War in Gaza, vibecessions, chaos in the White House, growing AI fears, scientists slashed, anti-vaccination on the rise — it’s like someone took Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and asked a large-language model to update the lyrics. I mean, the Economist’s word of the year for 2025 was “slop.” As in, the content slop, much of it AI-generated, that has spread across the internet like black mold. That is not the sign of a good year.

But here at Good News HQ — i.e., my kid’s bedroom in Brooklyn — we like to look at the bright side. And amid all the dispiriting slop, 2025 had more than its share of genuinely positive stories and trends. Here are some of the best:

Last August, a baby named KJ Muldoon was born with a severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that prevents the liver from clearing ammonia. The condition is the result of mutations in a single gene, and it is effectively a death sentence: Half of all babies born with the disorder die in infancy.

But KJ’s doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) came up with a potential solution: fix the single incorrect DNA letter among the 3 billion in his genome using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Researchers at CHOP and University of California-Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, as well as other institutions, developed in just six months a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy that could go into KJ’s body and correct that one, fatal genetic error.

In February of this year, after the team received an emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, KJ received his first infusion of the CRISPR therapy. By April he was showing improvement and by June, after 307 days in the hospital, he was discharged — the first person ever healed with a personalized gene therapy.

This story is obviously the best of news for KJ and his parents, but it goes far beyond them. More than 30 million people in the US alone suffer from one of 7,000 rare genetic diseases — diseases so rare that no company would develop a gene therapy just for them. But KJ’s treatment shows it is becoming feasible to rapidly develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive testing. That’s an enormous gift for countless patients too often left behind by drug companies, and it shows how CRISPR means “we can finally have some say in our genetic features,” in the words of the molecular biologist David Liu.

As for KJ, while he will still require lifelong monitoring, he’s doing great. He just took his first steps.

For a year that often felt apocalyptic in the feeds, a strange phenomenon flew under the radar: A lot of the worst numbers in American life started moving in the right direction.

Across 42 big US cities, homicides fell about 17 percent in the first half of the year compared with 2024, and most other serious violent crimes were down too; many places are now hovering around or below their pre-pandemic homicide levels. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked at roughly 110,000 in 2023, dropped to about 80,000 in 2024 — nearly a 27 percent decline and the sharpest one-year fall the CDC has ever recorded. And after years of grinding upward, the US suicide rate ticked down slightly in 2024, to about 48,800 deaths.

On the roads, motor-vehicle deaths — which spiked during the pandemic — have now fallen for several years in a row: the government now estimates about 39,000 traffic deaths in 2024, down from roughly 41,000 in 2023; early 2025 projections show another 8 percent decline in the first half of the year, even as Americans drive more miles.

So why doesn’t it feel like everything bad is falling? Partly because we’re coming down from brutal pandemic-era highs — 80,000 overdose deaths and double-digit homicide declines are “good news” only in a very specific context. But the hopeful read is that 2025 isn’t just a regression to the mean, but the beginning of a long-term decline in everything bad.

If you wanted to tell a story about America’s health in the 2020s, you could do a lot worse than this: we’re drinking less and, for the first time in a long time, we’re a little less heavy.

On the booze side, Gallup now finds just 54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol at all — the lowest share since the question was first asked in 1939. Among those who do drink, frequency is down, and per-capita alcohol consumption has edged lower since the 1980s. Teen drinking has fallen even faster: the share of 12th graders who say they drink has dropped from about 3 in 4 in the late ’90s to roughly 2 in 5 today, with similar collapses for 10th and 8th graders.

At the same time, one of America’s most stubborn health crises may finally be bending. After years of steady increases, Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index shows self-reported adult obesity falling from about 40 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2025.

The best explanation isn’t a miracle diet or a national love affair with salads; it’s the rapid uptake of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which calm hunger signals in the brain and help many patients lose 15 to 20 percent of their body weight, with knock-on benefits for diabetes and heart disease.

None of this eliminates obesity or alcohol harms overnight. But both curves, for once, are pointing in the right direction.

For kids who grew up in the 1980s like me, the big environmental fear wasn’t climate change — it was the ozone hole. Thanks primarily to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), humans tore a hole in the layer of the atmosphere that protects life from harmful UV rays. Unlike most environmental threats, it was easily visible, a big, black blob over Antarctica that seemed as if it would swallow the globe.

Yet 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-eating chemicals, the ozone layer is measurably on the mend. In 2025, European and US scientists say, the Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest since 2019 and the fifth smallest since 1992. Meanwhile, nearly 99 percent of banned ozone-depleting substances have already been phased out.

The long-term forecast is even brighter. If countries keep complying with the treaty, experts expect the ozone layer over most of the world to return to 1980 levels by around 2040, with the Arctic following by about 2045 and even the notoriously damaged Antarctic ozone hole healing by roughly 2066. Phasing out these chemicals has also avoided an extra 0.5–1°C of global warming that would otherwise have been baked in.

The big story is as simple as it is rare when it comes to the environment: the world passed a binding treaty, stuck with it, and actually managed to fix the problem.

I’ll let you in on a little secret about Good News. The surest way to feel optimistic about the state of the world is often less about how good the present is than how bad — how terribly, unimaginably bad — most of the past was. And few years in the past were worse than 536 AD, the year Science magazine once memorably called “the worst year to be alive.”

What was so bad about it? Well, a fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and even parts of Asia into a noontime darkness for 18 months. Average temperatures in the summer fell by as much as 2.5 C, beginning what would become the coldest decade of the past 2,300 years. Harvests failed across much of the world, leading to widespread starvation. Oh, and the scene was set for the Plague of Justinian, an outbreak of bubonic plague that began in Egypt and ultimately killed one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire.

Scientists now believe the immediate culprit was a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 that spread sun-blocking ash across the Northern Hemisphere. That eruption was accompanied by two more over the next 11 years, which really put the dark in Dark Ages. The economic stagnation that followed didn’t lift for a century.

So yeah, however bad you think 2025 was, I can tell you that 536 AD was way, way worse. But really, that’s true of nearly all the years of the past, when humans were poorer, less free, were more subject to violence, died sooner, and generally had to endure lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes.

So raise a (non-alcoholic, based on trends) toast to 2025. It could have been much, much worse.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!