Last week brought a grim new report about our psychological well-being. From 1999 to 2014, the age-adjusted suicide rate rose by 24% in the United States. It rose among girls and boys, men and women, in every age group under 75, and in almost every racial and ethnic category and subcategory.  (It fell 8% among black men but rose 24% among black women; it held close to steady for non-Hispanic Asians and Pacific Islanders.) 42,773 lives ended in suicide in 2014 in the U.S., about a third more than in motor vehicle crashes on our roadways.

We’re a society in anguish, and suicide is just the tip of it. For every suicide there are dozens of attempts and hundreds of people who think think about it. Increasing numbers of us eventually do kill ourselves but in ways that don’t quite qualify as suicide. The rate of death from alcohol, excluding homicides, driving, and other accidents, is rising at a rate similar to that of literal suicide, while the rate of death from drug overdose grew by 137% between 2000 and 2014. And while death keeps the best records, the signs of a broader suffering are all around us, too: economic insecurity, social isolation, fear for the future of our children and the planet.

Meanwhile, we haven’t stopped getting richer and richer. The rising GDP on that chart above is one measure of the growing value of all the work we all do each year, along with everything else we make money from. It’s a lot. But what’s the purpose of all that work, and all the wealth we generate, if we’re just increasing both our own present misery and our insecurity about the future? If we set our priorities together, democratically, we would create a society in which human beings would thrive. We shouldn’t wait.

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(data sources for chart: suicide growth based on CDC age-adjusted rates, links above; GDP growth based on BEA measure of GDP, chained dollars (2009) and USCB annual population estimates)