Life Changes
Healing Through Storytelling: Lessons from The Odyssey
The journey of Odysseus in Homer's 'The Odyssey' offers profound insights into healing...
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- Written by: Alex Jordan, InnerSelf.com
Most people have been taught that the fastest path to economic growth runs through the wealthy -- give investors more money, and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. But decades of evidence and the basic mechanics of how markets actually function tell a very different story. Real economies are driven by customers, not capital holders, and understanding that distinction changes everything about how you see growth, policy, and the future.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Across the 2026 Democratic primaries, something the party establishment did not plan for is happening in plain sight. A 29-year-old attorney knocks off a 30-year incumbent in Colorado. A democratic socialist wins New York City's mayoralty. Progressive insurgents topple entrenched moderates from Maine to California. This isn't a wave. It's a reckoning, decades in the making, and it is finally breaking the surface.
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- Written by: Alex Jordan, InnerSelf.com
A strait 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest point carries roughly 20% of the world's seaborne oil and LNG — and when it closes, the bill doesn't get sent to the generals who ordered the strikes. It gets sent to the family filling up the tank, buying groceries, and wondering why the mortgage payment feels heavier this month. The U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that began February 28, 2026, have set in motion an economic chain reaction that is still accelerating, and understanding its mechanics is the only way to see where it ends.
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- Written by: Beth McDaniel, InnerSelf.com
You have probably never stood in the cereal aisle and thought 'am I truly free right now?' But the question of whether your choices are genuinely yours runs deeper than philosophy classrooms and academic journals. It turns out that most ordinary people, when asked directly, believe they are free and responsible for what they do, even in a universe where causes and effects chain together like dominoes.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Inflation is the word everyone uses and almost no one fully understands. Your grocery bill goes up, the news blames the Federal Reserve, a politician blames the other party, and an economist writes a paper that takes three years to be proven wrong. The truth is messier, more interesting, and more useful than any of them will tell you.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
You were never handed this bill. That was the design. Spread across forty-six years and ten thousand ordinary transactions, no single charge ever looked like a policy, but added together they represent the most expensive thing that ever happened to your household. This article is the total, and it runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for most Americans, and well past a million for many.
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- Written by: Max Harris and Alexander E. Kentikelenis, University of Oxford
The concept of universal basic income (UBI) is gaining traction globally, with pilot programs underway in Finland, Canada, and the Netherlands. While it promises economic security, crucial questions arise about its impact on community solidarity and social bonds, as well as the risk of reinforcing individualistic values. Understanding these dynamics is essential for its successful implementation.
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- Written by: Chad M. Gasta
Studying abroad offers students significant advantages in the job market, enhancing critical thinking, communication skills, and cultural awareness. With increasing funding and diverse program options, more students, especially minorities, are seizing these opportunities to boost their employability and gain valuable international experience.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
My yard man understood inflation in sixty seconds, but the financial press establishment has spent months obscuring what any working person can grasp immediately: the difference between year-over-year and month-over-month inflation tells you whether prices are stabilizing or accelerating dangerously.
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- Written by: Alex Jordan, InnerSelf.com
A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would disrupt one-third of the world's seaborne oil trade overnight. If geopolitical tensions in Iran escalate to that point, your grocery bill, gas tank, and retirement account won't wait for diplomatic solutions. Understanding the mechanics of this risk isn't pessimism—it's financial literacy.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
We like to think of welfare as compassion—food stamps, rent relief, and heating aid helping people through hard times. But if that were enough, why does the need keep growing generation after generation. Maybe the problem is not that we have too little welfare, but that we built an economy that depends on it. The question is not how to fix welfare, but how to make it unnecessary.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
America spends more on health care than any other nation, yet the costs keep soaring and too many people still lose hope. The $2 trillion question is not simply about money, it’s about the choices we make when suffering becomes a commodity.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Rural America is losing its hospitals, its affordable housing, its farms, and its schools , not because of immigrants, not because of urban elites, and not because of woke ideology. It is losing them because of specific budget votes cast by specific legislators who then turn on Fox News and Newsmax to make sure you are angry at someone else before you can do the math. Fox News's own lawyers argued in federal court that their audience does not expect factual accuracy from their hosts. That entertainment product, engineered to generate outrage, is the single most important political force in rural America today. And it is working perfectly.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Most market analysts are asking the wrong question. They're debating whether we're in a bubble, scanning charts for the next 10% correction, arguing over Fed policy like it's the only variable that matters. Meanwhile, they're missing what might be the biggest structural shift since the steam engine changed everything. If this market peak is what it looks like, we're not just watching another bull market die. We're watching the slow-motion end of a 250-year experiment in pretending Earth's limits don't exist.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
You're working. Maybe two jobs. Maybe your spouse works too. You budget. You plan. You cut back. And still, by the end of the month, the numbers don't add up. Rent takes half your income. Groceries cost twenty percent more than last year. Your kid needs braces. The car needs fixing. Health insurance went up again. You're doing everything right, and you're still falling behind.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
What's happening to independent publishers didn't start with Google. It didn't start with algorithms or AI or any particular piece of technology. It started in the 1980s when two deliberate policy changes rewired how American corporations operate. One killed the rules that kept monopolies from forming. The other changed how executives get paid. Together, they turned extraction into the most profitable corporate strategy in nearly every industry. Understanding this explains why airlines, banks, food companies, and tech platforms all consolidated the same way—and why forty years of both parties did nothing to stop it.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
For thirty years, we published on the assumption that if you built something worth reading, people would find it. That assumption is now dead. Not because readers disappeared—they didn't. Not because quality stopped mattering—it still does. It died because the platforms that control discovery decided they could take the value without sending back the visitors. And then AI put that theft on steroids.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings
Americans aren't short on economic reform ideas—antitrust proposals, labor reforms, and platform regulation have existed for decades. Yet reforms repeatedly stall, weaken, or reverse. This isn't because ideas are bad. It's because two critical political preconditions have never existed. The extractive economy described in Parts 1-3 cannot be corrected through policy tweaks or better leadership. It can only be corrected after specific political conditions are met and a deliberate sequence of structural reforms follows.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings
Something feels off. Not catastrophically wrong—just persistently, exhaustingly not right. You work harder but get less. You follow the rules but fall further behind. You adapt and optimize and hustle, and the gap between effort and security just keeps widening. You're not imagining it. And it's not your fault.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Women folk healers were branded as witches, yet much of their work was early community medicine grounded in observation, relationship, and nature. Their suppression helped turn health from a shared practice into a gated profession. Today, Indigenous wisdom and modern science point in the same direction again. If we want longer, better lives, we must become proactive stewards of balance rather than passive recipients of treatments.
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- Written by: Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
Tariff impact on Chinese EVs is more than a trade skirmish; it’s a direct hit on consumers. By driving up costs and limiting affordable EV options, tariffs delay the clean energy transition and protect industry at the expense of everyday families. The truth is simple: Chinese EVs could have brought affordable mobility, but tariffs lock consumers into higher prices and fewer choices.
