DEEP DIVE: Re-engineering Your Second Act, Using AI

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As a woman in her 50s, I am at the start of the final ~40 years of life. For some this realization may be sobering, but for me it inspires focus. It has inspired me to stop wasting time.

For women, midlife is often perceived as a trough period in our well-being, a period of transition and assessment. While our generation is composed of the best-educated women to date, we are downwardly mobile due to spikes in home prices, cost of education and, most recently, inflation. Many of us who were hitting a career stride after taking time out of the workforce to raise families have been pushed back into caregiving, now for an aging parent or sick relative, bearing the brunt of lost wages and lower Social Security benefits over time. According to the St. Louis Fed, Women over 50 face long-term unemployment at higher rates, reflecting systemic age and gender biases in the labor market.

Right on schedule, my life has changed similarly. My relationship of 18 years ended. I moved from Portland, OR, to Irvine, CA, to care for my dad, who suffers from early-stage dementia. I was made redundant from my executive BD job at the end of last year.

And yet, the busy-ness void created by these career and personal transitions has allowed me time to rethink what has meaning and what doesn’t work anymore. My goals are no longer tied to my job, or my role as a parent, but to avoiding reaching my 80s asking, “Why did I waste so much time doing things that were not meaningful to me?” 

Despite the hits I took in the last few years, this year has been the happiest and most fulfilling one since the beginning of my career, when there was so much possibility.

I’ve had a resurgence of sorts, and I owe it to AI