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If someone asked you to name the world’s most common plotline you’d probably come up with something like this: a hero heeds a call to adventure—maybe to slay a dragon or protect their homeland—then they cross a threshold into the unknown, where they face tests, conquer a big challenge, and come home with a lesson or a prize. They’ve grown and learned and made things better. They get the girl; they save the castle. They are often a guy.

It’s the hero’s journey, a familiar arc, easy to transpose on different circumstances. Basically universal, right?

Writer Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology and philosophy, named the hero’s journey in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces . He said it was widespread and showed up in every culture.

In the 1980s, Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychotherapist who was a student of Campbell’s, came up with an alternative plotline, which she called the heroine’s journey . She found that in her therapy work, the hero’s journey arc didn’t encompass everything that her patients—particularly women—were going through. It didn’t answer questions about the roots of their struggles, or what happened after they climbed the mountain and still didn’t feel fulfilled. Or found another, different mountain in front of them.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Like the hero’s journey, the arc of the heroine’s journey comes in stages. The heroine starts by rejecting feminine values because she hasn’t seen a way to be fulfilled as a woman. Success looks like those masculine ideals, like big adventures or running companies, so she chases those. Then, like on the hero’s journey, she faces tests and trials; she finds success and slays dragons. But that’s where the arcs start to diverge.

Murdock says that at that point, on the outside, the journey might look good, but on the inside, as the heroine, you feel hollow, and not true to yourself. You start to get the feeling that your life isn’t quite right. You’ve achieved and achieved and you still seem unsatisfied. She calls that a sense of spiritual aridity . You feel oppressed, but you can’t find anyone oppressing you besides yourself. You might fall into crisis, even though you’ve achieved what the world said you should.

From there, the heroine has to recalibrate and align the ideals she was chasing with the things that feel true to themselves. Murdock calls this “healing the wounded masculine.” I see it as trying to square the pressure of achievement with what feels core, which can be difficult regardless of gender.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Murdock found that this conceit resonated with many of her patients. But when she brought it to Campbell in the early 80s, his response was, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

Which is exactly the kind of thing that happens on the heroine’s journey. You’re dismissed or pushed aside. You face dead ends and distrust and people telling you your voice doesn’t matter, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right.

I found the heroine’s journey when I was researching my book Fierce Country about three women who fundamentally changed American recreation and conservation, but who never got recognition. I’d worked in the outdoor world they’d shaped since I was a teenager, moving from the New England mountains to the rivers of the Southwest seeking sensation and the desire to be outside, but after more than two decades I realized I’d never had role models, or paths to follow along the way, in part because I’d been chasing that hero’s idea of bootstrapping my way through adventures on my wits and strength. I hadn’t let myself look at other kinds of stories. And when I finally realized what I’d missed, I wanted to fill in the gaps.

I became obsessed with the idea of heroes: whose stories got elevated, why I’d never had any of my own. And I kept getting tangled up in the knot Murdock outlined: I’d only heard hero stories that fit Campbell’s mold. But my own dragons had never been straightforward and easy to vanquish. Many of them had been inside my head.

So I went searching for heroes who seemed more relevant to me, ones that had been left out of the canon of stories that get told and retold.

I found the stories of three women who impressed me: Georgie White, the only woman to guide the Grand Canyon for decades, who changed how we get outside and fought against dams; mountain guide Anne LaBastille, who did groundbreaking climate science from her off-the-grid cabin in the Adirondacks; pioneering backcountry skier Dolores LaChapelle, who was also an environmental philosopher who shaped the radical environmental movement of the 1970s. They were all forging what I consider ideal lives outside, tied to the landscape they loved, fighting to protect it. But they seemed tricky, too. Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

I realized I was stuck in Murdock’s second stage, trying to fit myself into masculine ideas, frustrated when it didn’t feel right for me, or the women I was looking at, because I was still hemmed in by expectations that the arc of achievement would be clear.

The women I was looking at were groundbreaking and adventurous and committed to ideals that I think are crucial, but they were also mean and judgmental and prone to bending the truth. They didn’t get traditional happily-ever-afters and their quests—like Anne’s push to curb carbon pollution or Georgie’s desire to protect the landscape she loved—are still, frustratingly, ongoing. They didn’t get easy resolution, they had to keep pushing against misogyny, dismissiveness and more, but I think that makes their stories more interesting and more real.

One friend described the heroine’s journey as if the hero’s journey went to therapy—reflective and aware of context. I think that might be true, but it’s also as if the hero kept living past a single quest. Those women are heroes because they didn’t just fight a battle then come home to glory. They kept fighting even when the rewards were hard to grasp, even when their narratives weren’t tidy.

I think we default to well-known stories and familiar plot beats because it’s reassuring to feel like good will win over evil, that we’ll have a happy ending. But that’s not the way life works. And it’s misleading and kind of boring to think it might, in storytelling and otherwise. I don’t want to keep cramming stories into the constraints of the hero’s journey. I want to let them be messy and complex and ongoing.

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Fierce Country by Heather Hansman is available from Hanover Square Press.

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The use of nicotine pouches is increasing among teenagers and young adults in the U.S. As researchers who study nicotine use among young people and develop strategies to prevent it, we worry these discreet products might be driving a new public health crisis. It may be that more and more teens are becoming addicted to nicotine pouches under our watch.

To stop that crisis in its tracks, we need to act now. Myriad strategies would help, including eliminating flavored pouches and reducing the amount of nicotine in the products, as well as regulating their marketing and stopping companies from making deceptive claims. And while we await such regulation, informing educators, parents and teens about the harms of nicotine pouches will be key.

Why worry now? Nicotine pouches — small, pillow-like products that users place between their gum and lip — are now the second most used tobacco product among U.S. adolescents. In a recent survey , 2.3% of high school and about 1% of middle school students, an estimated 460,000 students total, reported using a pouch in the past month. More than 9 in 10 pouch users opted for flavored pouches, with mint being the most popular.

While rates of pouch use remain behind e-cigarette use, more students reported using pouches than cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco or any other form of nicotine. Nicotine pouches were the only product whose use increased in the survey, while the popularity of other products declined or remained stable.

What makes nicotine pouches particularly tricky is how invisible they are to the outside observer. Unlike cigarettes, they produce no smoke. Unlike e-cigs, they generate no visible aerosol. They are small and easy to conceal. That invisibility is not a coincidence; it's part of big tobacco companies' intentional design. An adolescent can use nicotine pouches during class and no one around them would know.

Each pouch contains nicotine powder that is either derived from tobacco plants or synthetically produced, as well as other ingredients like acidity regulators and flavorings. Those flavors can be dessert-like, fruity, minty, and reminiscent of coffee or cocktails — all of which appeal to young people .

The amount of nicotine per pouch varies by brand, but generally, using one pouch is roughly equivalent to smoking one to four — or more — cigarettes. That's a problem because, although pouches don't produce smoke, nicotine is still very addictive and harmful to the developing brain.

Nicotine use can negatively affect teens' attention and impede their impulse control , hurting their academic performance and mental health. In regards to physical health, data suggest that smokeless oral nicotine products may harm some aspects of heart health and raise the risk of death in people with existing heart disease.

Tobacco companies are employing the same advertising tropes that they've successfully used to lure young users in the past. (Image credit: Peter Dazeley via Getty Images) It may be tempting to wave away concern because the percentage of adolescents using these pouches appears relatively small. However, that would be a mistake, as doing so would mean watching history repeat itself.

Rates of e-cigarette use also started low, and by the time national data finally showed a clear increase, their use was already a deeply entrenched behavior among adolescents, with many addicted. Furthermore, national surveillance studies are, by design, snapshots in time and often lag behind what is happening in real time in classrooms and communities.

We're concerned that more teens are becoming addicted to nicotine pouches, now, and want to curb the trend. At Stanford Medicine's REACH lab , we work with thousands of schools and teachers across the U.S. every year, providing free, evidence-based tobacco prevention curriculums. We've spoken with hundreds of educators, parents and students across the country who have raised significant concerns about nicotine pouches, and presented talks to over 1,200 people on the subject.

It became clear that we must create a specific approach to prevent teens from using pouches — so, we created a course called Not So Sweet: Oral Nicotine and Smokeless Tobacco Prevention Curriculum .

The free course is designed to be used in schools or by anyone who works with teens. It explains the different types of oral nicotine and smokeless tobacco products and their many health effects, including addiction. It also lays out the marketing tactics employed by the tobacco industry to attract youth in the first place. In just a few short weeks of releasing the curriculum, we already have over 1,500 active users.

We're heartened that people are already engaging with the course, because we might already have a public health crisis on our hands.

Today's nicotine pouch market in the U.S. is dominated by three brands : the top seller, ZYN; On!; and VELO. These brands are owned by Philip Morris International, Altria, and British American Tobacco, respectively. The companies have decades of knowledge in marketing nicotine products that they are now deploying to sell nicotine pouches.

They're falling back on successful advertising tropes , telling consumers that nicotine pouches could help them socialize, unwind, or appear cool to potential romantic partners. Ads also emphasize the discreet nature of the pouches, which allows them to be used anywhere without drawing too much attention.

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Through these marketing strategies, nicotine pouches have soared in popularity and sales, Zyn has become a household name, gaining nicknames like Zynnie, Zynfluence and Zyndulgence. Zyn has effectively become the "Coke" of colas, the Kleenex of tissues, the Juul of e-cigs.

What's more, the Food and Drug Administration just authorized various Zyn products to be marketed with the claim that using Zyn instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. But when it comes to teenagers, we see many using Zyn or other nicotine pouches alone or alongside other nicotine products that aren't cigarettes. Unlike adult smokers who may be switching to pouches, teens may be newly introduced to nicotine addiction through products like Zyn.

It is not a matter of cigarettes versus Zyn for many teens; it is Zyn versus nothing.

Nicotine pouches might come in tantalizing flavors, but they are not sweet — they are dangerous, especially for adolescents. Reminiscent of what we've seen for decades with cigarettes and over the last decade with e-cigarettes, we once again have a nicotine product that is very appealing to and being increasingly used by young people. Yet, they contain a great deal of nicotine and are unsafe . We need to work together, now, to ensure we don't perpetuate another generation of addicted kids.

Editor's note: Bonnie Halpern-Felsher has served as an expert witness in litigation against various tobacco companies.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

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A few weeks back, Samsung confirmed the existence of its next-gen flagship processor — the Exynos 2700 . According to the latest rumors, the chip is destined for big things, not only powering the baseline entries in next year’s Galaxy S27 series but also the highly anticipated Galaxy S27 Pro .

Well, at least some models. Reports suggest Samsung will continue to use its dual-chip strategy across all models except the Ultra. This means the Galaxy S27, S27 Plus, and S27 Pro will ship with the Exynos 2700 in most global markets, while the US, China, and a few other select regions receive a Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered variant.

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Gone are the days when Disney could pick any classic animated movie from its library, remake it in live-action, and earn hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. In fact, none of the four biggest live-action remakes that Disney produced in the last two decades — Beauty and the Beast , The Lion King , Aladdin , and Alice in Wonderland — even earned universally positive reviews. But the most recent movies in this streak (bar the Lilo & Stitch remake) have increasingly underperformed. The latest is the Moana remake that was released in theaters worldwide this past week. The film's weak box office has led to projected losses exceeding $100 million.