While Everyone Panics About AI, Midlife Women Are Having the Last Laugh

Or...The Miami Airport Revelation That Changed How I See the Future

It’s business as usual in the age of disruption.

This past weekend, we drove north through the Scottish Highlands to meet some friends for lunch in their holiday home in a little coastal Highland village. It was a three-hour drive, and although my husband and I are pretty nonstop chatters, there was definitely other stuff whirling around in my brain. It's hard not to go silent and get into your head while enjoying the view out the window on a Scottish Highlands drive. Need some proof?

Anyway, I've been a bit stuck ruminating on the future of humanity. I know, "Get over it,” I tell myself, "You're not some super educated futurist who should be talking out loud about this stuff." But I keep thinking about it nonetheless.

The friends that we are on our way to visit, we met on our trip to Antarctica. That little ship (we were on there for nearly a month, so lots of time to get to know people when I wasn't lying catatonic in my cabin holding on to the rolling bed) held so many interesting people, and we are lucky to have made strong and lasting friendships with a few of them. The couple we are visiting are intelligent, generous, accomplished, and great cooks (he made a killer cullen-skink and gave me the recipe). They are retired now, enjoying a life filled with bundles of grandchildren and travel, but they were also successful in their work life. He was a Queen's (King's) Counsel, one of the most respected barristers in Scotland. She was a professional ballerina with the Royal Ballet. As we were driving up, I was musing on their beautiful life (their Extraordinary Life). I would assume that most of what they had now, their financial security, their social standing, their lovely holiday home that has been in his family for 150 years, didn't come from the ballet (although I am not reducing her achievement - I mean the Royal Ballet... Come on!). Chances are pretty high that all that success was built on his ability to read, analyze, synthesize information, and present compelling arguments.

All the things AI will do better than any human within the decade.

What's so truly ironic is that in thirty years, it will probably be the ballerina who will have the career success that he enjoyed as a lawyer. AI can't do ballet. It can't replicate such a truly human activity based on physical dexterity and aesthetic expression. In thirty years, a ballerina will be much better placed to succeed in life than a barrister.

Ten years ago now, when our daughter called me to tell me she had decided not to go to the prestigious college program she had been accepted to and won a huge scholarship for, I was panicked. She had a real talent for film and writing (her major was to be "Dramatic Writing"), but had been nurturing a passion for cooking and baking. She was done with school, she said, she wanted to go to work. Yes, I wanted her to do what made her happy, but not get a degree? Wasn't that setting her up for a lifetime of struggle?

No.

It turns out she made what seems to be a clairvoyant choice. Freelance writing gigs dropped by 30% within just eight months following the launch of ChatGPT (late 2022).¹ The writing jobs are continuing to decline. She is now a pastry chef at a Michelin-starred bakery. She works with her hands, creates something people can taste and touch, and builds skills that can't be downloaded or automated. While her friends with expensive degrees are sending out hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back, she's safe in a way we never imagined. Artisanal pastry chef robots don't appear to be in our near future.

I had another impactful conversation last week, with a young filmmaker who proudly told me he refuses to use AI. Not just in his creative work (which I can respect). He won't even use it to help with emails or research. He wants to keep his creativity pure. Sure, he's taking a noble stand against the inevitable future, but he's also trying to build a business to make money at the same time. It's true that there will be a sacred space for artisanal creativity in our AI-powered future, but I don't think those who want to build a career will be able to opt out completely - they will most likely be outpaced.

Universal Basic Income, please come and save our gorgeous, creative young souls. Let them contribute to humanity without sacrificing their own.

But here is what struck me the most as we navigated those winding Highland roads: everyone is still acting like the world they planned for is the world their children will inherit.

The Superhero Gear That Fooled Us All

Years ago, I started building my Extraordinary Life when I created a location-independent business that I could run from anywhere. I chose to live in The Bahamas because... well, do I really have to explain or justify?

While we were living in the Bahamas and I was running my business from there, I spent a ton of time in the Miami airport. It was the layover spot for basically anywhere I wanted to go. During these waiting hours, I became morbidly fascinated by the businesswomen hanging around in the lounge or lining up to board. Every one of them was preening and resplendent in her required superhero gear. They wore expensive business suits, chatted on their (very early model) iPhones, kept their laptops open in front of them with Coach bags at their feet, and Prada sunglasses perched on their perfectly coiffed heads. They usually moved in packs, all exactly the same, all radiating this unshakeable confidence that came from knowing exactly who they were.

Or at least, they thought they did.

Even though I had once been one of them, I had turned in my super-hero outfit for cut-off shorts and flip-flopped feet. I had a laptop open in front of me, but I still gathered looks of disdain from the superheroes (or heroines). They had no idea that I was running a million-dollar business from my sandy lap; my true identity was hidden. I was Clark Kent.

The pang of envy I experienced as one of them gracefully stepped her Jimmy Choos over my flip-flopped feet wasn't from wanting to be them; it was a craving for that validation so neatly packaged and instantly recognizable. The successful businesswoman, the important person who traveled the world, the one whose worth was visible in her accessories and job title.

That's what I call instant identity. It's when you outsource your sense of self to easily recognized roles: the high-powered attorney, the marketing executive, the journalist at a prestigious publication, the computer programmer who commands six figures fresh out of college. When you're ensconced in the cocoon of an easily recognized character, you feel safe. People know who you are. Other people can see you're successful. People respect you.

But most of those women in the Miami airport hadn't chosen their superhero gear. They'd just been told that was what “successful” looked like. They'd been handed a script for how to perform competence, achievement, and worth. They were playing roles they thought they were supposed to want.

Although I may have felt a pang of envy under their withering glances, I knew I didn't want an instant identity ever again. I wanted my flip-flops, my hours with my daughter, and my backyard swimming pool that wasn't open on a schedule.

The Performance We've Been Running Our Whole Lives

Women have lived in an instant identity crisis their entire lives. We've been told who we should be, how we should perform those roles, what success should look like, and what happens if we fail to deliver the right version of ourselves.

Be the good student, the dutiful daughter, the supportive wife, the devoted mother, the team player at work, the woman who has it all together. Be thin (but not too thin; where are your curves, honey?). Be accomplished. Be grateful. Be quiet about your ambitions and achievements. Be everything to everyone while making it look effortless.

Most of us spent our twenties and thirties trying to nail the performance. We bought the right clothes, pursued the right degrees, took the right jobs, married young (always a mistake), had children at the right time, and kept the right homes. We performed “success” so convincingly that even we believed it.

But if it doesn’t happen to you before, around midlife, something revolutionary happens to women. Just when we think everything is being taken away from us by menopause, our fertility, our brainpower, our optimism, our body temperature, even our sleep, we are gifted the realization that we'd been so busy being who we thought we should be that we forgot to figure out who we actually were. We midlife women are experts at changing our identity to suit, but are we experts at knowing which of those identities is the real one? No. But we can find out.

Which brings me to this... this post isn't about AI taking jobs.

This post is about AI taking identities.

Because I think the entire world is about to ask the question of themselves that we midlife women have been grappling with for centuries. When you take away our roles, when you strip away the advice that we've been able to rely on to help us perform the identities that society has deemed appropriate, who are we?

Who is my barrister friend when he's told he has less worth (in fact, he's not important to societal contributions at all; AI can do that) than his ballerina wife? Who is my young filmmaker when he's told he can certainly stick to his anti-AI choices, but then he probably has a hobby and not a business?

Why This Feels Like Déjà Vu

Remember when your identity shifted from "career woman" to "mom" and suddenly you didn't know how to introduce yourself at parties? Remember when all the kids happily trotted off to college and you weren't sure what you were supposed to do with all that space in your life? Remember when divorce, or loss, or a chronic illness stripped away the role that had defined you, and you had to figure out who you were underneath all of that?

We've been living through identity earthquakes our entire adult lives. Every major transition (marriage, motherhood, caregiving for aging parents, menopause, empty nest, career changes, relocations) forced us to rebuild our identity to a more suitable one when the external markers shifted.

What's happening to twenty-somethings with computer science degrees? We've already been there. The panic about instant identity collapse? We lived it when we became "just mom" or "just wife" and discovered those roles felt too small for who we actually were.

The difference is that we are our own wise women. We learned something from those experiences, even if we've forgotten it now, I promise you it can be remembered. When everything external gets stripped away, something essential remains. Our worth isn't determined by how well we perform the roles we've been given. We learned that the most devastating identity crises often become the most liberating awakenings. And midlife is the time for the biggest and the best.

The Prediction I Don't Want to Own Up to.

Last week, I had one of those conversations that crack you open. I was talking with AI about the future, and she said something that stopped me cold: "There will be fragmentation of identity. When AI can convincingly mimic any persona, where does identity live?"

Then came the line that's been rattling around in my head ever since: "Whatever you are best at, AI will be better."

I wrote about identity fragmentation, about what happens when the external scaffolding we've built our sense of self around gets swept away. The real crisis wouldn't just be job displacement, but identity collapse. It will be the moment when millions of people who have always answered "What do you do?" with their professional identity will discover that their "go-to" instant identity answer no longer exists.

It's happening now. Computer science graduates face 6.1% unemployment (which, if you can believe it, is higher than philosophy majors.)² Employment for recent computer science graduates has declined by 8% since 2022, while software development job postings have plummeted by 33%.³ ⁴ Marketing consulting and graphic design roles are falling "below trend" as AI automates content creation.

Over 806,000 private-sector job cuts were announced through July 2025, the highest since 2020.⁵ Over 10,000 of these cuts were directly attributed to AI automation. These folks aren't only experiencing the loss of future opportunity; they're experiencing identity collapse.

But the thing is, we wise women know this isn't a new problem. This is the same constant identity crisis that we've been navigating for decades, just happening faster and to more people at once.

Why Midlife Women Saw This Coming

While twenty-somethings are panicking because their entire identity is tied to suddenly wobbling career ladders, we've already done the hard work of learning that we are not our job titles. We've already discovered that when everything external gets stripped away, something essential remains.

We have repeated instances of that lived experience of rebuilding identity from scratch

We understand something younger workers are just discovering: the difference between instant identity and authentic identity. One can be automated, replicated, or made obsolete, while the other can't.

So come on, my heroines! We've been practicing for this moment our entire lives. Every time we've rebuilt ourselves after loss, every time we've discovered strength we didn't know we had, every time we've created something from nothing, all our little "t" traumas were rehearsals for what everyone else is experiencing as unprecedented disruption.

The young people struggling with this transition are mourning the loss of their first adult identity. But midlife women? We know how to reinvent ourselves, how to find solid ground when the world shifts beneath us, and how to recognize that the roles we perform are not who we are.

The Real Work: Beyond Any Role

This is exactly why I built the Heroine's Adventure framework. Not because I knew AI was coming, but because I kept meeting women who were lost when their external identities crumbled. Women who'd been performing roles their entire lives and suddenly found themselves asking, "Who am I when I'm not performing for everyone else?"

Chapter 1 of the Heroine's Adventure is called "Recognizing Yourself as a Heroine," and the first step is learning to separate your identity from your circumstances. It's about answering the question "Who am I?" without listing your roles, your job title, your relationships, or your achievements.

It's the work of discovering what remains when everything else gets stripped away.

This isn't therapy (I'm not qualified for that and won't go back to school for it because AI will probably be our therapist in the future - how scary is that!), but it's also not self-help fluff either. This work is a survival skill for the age we're entering. When your professional identity becomes obsolete overnight, when the roles you've been performing no longer serve you, when the external markers of success mean nothing...Who are you?

You're a heroine.

The women who can answer that question without pause will thrive in what's coming. The ones who anchor their identity in their values, vision, and voice, not their performance of socially acceptable roles, will be the ones who can't be automated, replicated, or replaced.

While others scramble to retrain for jobs that may not exist in five years, we're already doing the deeper work of knowing ourselves beyond any job description, any title, any role we've been told to play.

The Invitation

This isn't a crisis for midlife women. It's vindication.

While others are losing their identities to technological disruption, we're reclaiming ours from everything that was never really us to begin with. While they're panicking about what they're going to do, we're finally free to focus on who we're going to be.

The future doesn't belong to people with the right degree or the perfect performance of “success.” It belongs to women who know exactly who they are when the roles fall away. The future belongs to women who can't be replicated because they're too busy being authentically, messily, boldly themselves.

This is your time to claim your story. Your time to decide what your Extraordinary Life looks like when it's not defined by anyone else's script for who you should be. Your time to step into the main character role you were always meant to play, and not the one you were told to perform.

The world is about to realize what midlife women already know: when everything you thought was permanent turns out to be temporary, the only thing that matters is who you are when you're completely alone with yourself, stripped of all the roles, all the titles, all the superhero gear.

And heroine, we've had that conversation. We know the answer.

The adventure of being fully human starts now.

The question isn't whether you're ready for the future that's coming.

The question is whether the future is ready for who you're becoming.

What are you thinking about all this? Hit reply and let me know. Human-to-human conversation about identity feels more important than ever.

If you’ve been reading my weirdo newsletters for the past few weeks, you’ll know I have two new mantras…

“Be Human.”

This is my stand against what’s coming in terms of AGI emergence. I am focusing my creativity, my entrepreneurship, and my life on the human aspects of being alive.

All of this is governed by my second mantra (born of burnout)…

“Why Can’t it Be Easy?”

This means using AI's capabilities for all the boring stuff while I do the fun stuff (like writing and creating).

These two mantras combined have spawned

The new Questbooks™. No more long-term, video-based, expensive courses that you find overwhelming (and so do I). But luxurious, hand-journaling workbooks covering all of the life-changing exercises that are part of the Heroine’s Adventure.

My very human Creative Writing & Life-Planning Retreats (where you can join me all over the world). They are easy to book, easy to attend, and easy for me to focus on what’s truly transformational.

And finally, my fiction!

I’m launching a Substack for each of the seven (4 published, 3 unpublished) novels that have been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to have the time and attention to “launch” them. Well, I’m launching them now. I’m releasing these in the spirit of “Be Human” (I wrote them) and “Why Can’t it Be Easy” (my VA will publish them).

The first novel will start publishing this week. I’m not auto-subscribing anyone. So if you would like to read it, you can click the Subscribe button on this post:

Introduction to The Descent

I hope you will join me and Leonore as she finds herself and uncovers the secrets of Great America.

Onwards, Always!

LM xx

1. JournoPortfolio. (2023, August 1). Don’t let AI writing tools impact your freelance writing career: Here’s how to protect your business. JournoPortfolio Blog. https://www.journoportfolio.com/blog/dont-let-ai-writing-tools-impact-your-freelance-writing-career-heres-how-to-protect-your-business

2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2025). Labor Market Report. As cited in Shibu, S. (2025, May 16). These Are the College Majors With the Lowest Unemployment Rates — and Philosophy Ranks Higher Than Computer Science. Entrepreneur.

3. Oxford Economics. (2025, May). Computer Science Graduate Employment Report. As cited in CNN Business. (2025, August 28). 150 job applications, rescinded offers: Computer science grads are struggling to find work.

4. Indeed via Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). (2025). Software Development Job Postings Index. As cited in Visual Capitalist. (2025, March 14). Charted: The Decline of U.S. Software Developer Jobs.

5. Challenger, Gray & Christmas. (2025, July 31). Summer Lull Ends: July 2025 Job Cut Announcements Spike to 62,075. Challenger Report.