A little over a decade ago, I was in the prime of my career, moving fast, making decisions, and managing rooms full of people who expected me to have the answers.

And I was good at it.
Not because I was uniquely gifted, but because GenX women had to be. We learned early how to read situations, make decisions quickly, and keep things moving, often without much support or acknowledgment.

So when I read Palantir CEO Alex Karp say this about artificial intelligence, I didn’t panic. I paused.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”

I read it twice, and then I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was so revealing.

Because the people he’s talking about, the humanities-trained, highly educated, often female professionals, that’s us. That’s GenX women.

We were raised in that strange in-between space where independence was not a philosophy; it was a requirement. We came home to empty houses, figured things out on our own, and carried that mindset straight into adulthood.

We built careers in environments that were often chaotic, competitive, and not designed with us in mind. So we adapted. We learned how to read the room, manage egos, anticipate problems before they surfaced, and quietly take on more than our share of the work.

We became the glue. The people who held things together, whether or not anyone acknowledged it. If you have seen the film Working Girl, or 9-5 then you get it. Jane Fonda’s character said of her male boss:

“You’re a sexist, egotistical, lying hypocritical bigot.”

We are certainly seeing the same today. Like right now. Every day. Which is sad!

In 2017 #MeToo happened.

For a brief moment, it felt like something might genuinely shift. Women were telling the truth, people were listening, and there were real consequences for behavior that had been ignored for years. But that moment didn’t last.

The meetings did not fundamentally change. The power dynamics did not really shift. And the risk, the very real calculation women make before speaking up, never fully went away.

Even now, many women still pause and ask themselves what it will cost to say something out loud. Will this affect my career? Will I be labeled difficult? Will I quietly lose opportunities without anyone ever saying why?

So we do what we have always done. We assess the situation, adapt to it, and keep moving forward.

Which is why the idea that AI is somehow going to disrupt us feels almost beside the point. We have been operating inside disruption our entire lives. We navigated workplaces without clear rules, succeeded in environments without real accountability, and built stability in places where there was often little to begin with.

We are not fragile. If anything, we are exceptionally capable of managing complexity, uncertainty, and change. The Force is strong with us.

But there is another side to that story that we do not talk about enough.

In becoming everything for everyone else, the reliable one, the steady one, the one who figures it out, we were never really taught how to show up for ourselves in the same way.

Not without guilt and not without overthinking. And certainly not without the constant sense that something else needed our attention first.

So we got very good at holding everything together while slowly losing touch with what we actually needed.

That, to me, is the real disruption. Not AI. It is Awareness.

Because something is shifting now, and it is subtle but unmistakable.

GenX women are waking up to themselves, not in a loud or performative way, but in a grounded, clear, and deeply personal way. There is a growing willingness to ask different questions, to stop tolerating what no longer works, and to imagine a life that feels more aligned and less reactive.

What do I actually want now? What am I done carrying? What would it feel like to move through my life with more clarity and less noise? I have been pondering this question since the pandemic.

Then I took all of my life lessons from working in politics and corporate America, and, of course, from the hundreds of books I have read over the years, and created Live Simply, Give Freely.

Not as another program layered on top of already full lives, and not as a version of hustle culture dressed up in softer language. It is a space for reconnecting with your own thinking, your energy, your priorities, and the bigger picture of where your life is going. I am sharing the small everyday habits that, over time, have built grounding, ever-expanding emotional intelligence and peace.

Because the world is changing quickly, technologically, economically, culturally, and most of us were never given a roadmap for how to navigate that in a way that actually feels grounded and sustainable.

And pushing harder is not the answer. Getting clearer is.

We have spent decades holding up families, organizations, and entire systems.

But we were never meant to disappear inside that role.

We are not just the support system.
We are not just the ones who fix things quietly in the background.
And we are certainly not being replaced.