If you dig a little deeper, however, you see the usual miseries: losses (personal and financial), rejections, doubts, existential fears.
Deregulation in a world of insufficiency brought unparalleled misery and loss.
With her trademark bluntness, she describes her 30's as "a wasteland of misery and loss and mourning and drinking".
In the movie High Fidelity, John Cusack's character laments, "Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.
Every Christmas, I try to create the warmest, coziest home for my family, to erase the memories of misery and loss that I experienced in my youth.
"The art of losing isn't hard to master," Elizabeth Bishop tells us — and yet artistry can often seem the least appropriate response to the misery of loss.
War, misery and loss are hardly strangers to the vast swath of central Asia from the steppes of Iran to the snow-lashed mountains of the Hindu Kush, yet only when the region's troubles threaten to seep beyond its borders does the world take note.
By now, one prospect — a notion no one wants to ponder but is impossible to avoid — has begun to emerge in Iowa, as well as in Indiana, Minnesota and Illinois: the possibility that this summer might prove to be something like 1993, when the torment of flooding resulted in widespread personal misery and loss, as well as economic cost of $20 billion.
"The alternative to peace is war, which will expose everyone to mass casualties, misery and a loss of perspective for many years to come," Mr. Trajkovski said.
