Why I’m using AI to get through midlife, and why I’m not remotely ashamed of it

If you’d told me at 23 that by 50 I’d be using AI to make life easier, I’d have laughed. But with brain fog, work, family and the demands of midlife, I’ve found myself asking whether AI might actually be useful.

Fast forward to 50. Brain fog, perimenopause, late-night gym sessions, work and a nine-year-old boy with an endless supply of “why?” questions mean I need all the help I can get. Add a brain that can produce six thoughts before I’ve finished the first one, and I’m starting to see the appeal of anything that helps me get them in order.

If I put pre-workout in my water bottle before a HIIT class, why shouldn’t I use AI as a performance enhancer for my brain?

It helps me structure my thoughts, pull an idea apart and get back to what I was actually trying to say. That can make a difference when my attention is everywhere and my mental energy isn’t unlimited. Meanwhile, people around me on the bus are scrolling endlessly through TikTok, barely focusing for more than a minute, while my son is gleefully slaughtering cooked chickens in a tank on Roblox.

I quietly laugh. We’re all using technology in different ways. But if AI can help me think more clearly, create something useful and make parts of midlife a little easier, I’m struggling to see why I should feel guilty about using it.

For me, this isn’t about whether AI can replace human thinking. It’s about whether it can help me make better use of my own brain when there is already rather a lot competing for my attention.

At 50, I have plenty of experience, ideas and opinions. What I don’t always have is the time, focus or mental energy to organise them all.

So I want to find out whether AI can genuinely make midlife easier – or whether I’m simply finding another way to fill my head with technology.

I’m not a coder, a tech guru or even a prompt-hoarder. I’m a 50-year-old woman with a head full of half-formed ideas, questions and thoughts that don’t always arrive in a particularly helpful order.

Sometimes I know exactly what I mean but can’t quite get the words out. Sometimes I start with one thought and end up somewhere completely different. That’s familiar territory for me, particularly when my attention is already being pulled in six directions.

AI doesn’t mind.

I can say, “I’m not sure if this is right, but here’s what I’m thinking…” and keep working at an idea without worrying that I sound muddled. It gives me somewhere to put the thoughts, sort through them and come back to what I was actually trying to say.

That makes a difference. Not because AI is doing my thinking for me, but because it removes some of the friction between having an idea and doing something with it.

And when midlife already comes with homework battles, washing mountains, family debates and a brain that occasionally loses the plot halfway through a sentence, I’ll take any tool that makes the process a little easier.

There’s a huge debate about AI. One camp thinks it will save us; the other thinks it’s for lazy people and will turn our brains to mush. But NEITHER argument really answers the question I’m asking.

Can AI actually make midlife easier?

Because if using AI means handing over my thinking, then perhaps the critics have a point, but that isn’t what I’m doing.

I’m still the one having the creative ideas, making the decisions and deciding what ultimately matters. AI just helps me get there when my thoughts are scattered, my attention has wandered off or I’m running low on mental energy.

So the real question isn’t whether AI makes us think less, I think it’s whether it can help us spend our thinking on the things that matter most.

I keep hearing about the importance of writing the perfect prompt. I’m not convinced.

For me, the useful part is the conversation. I bring the story, the half-formed idea, the question or the problem, and AI helps me work through it. The more context I give it, the more useful the conversation becomes.

It doesn’t magically turn a muddled thought into a brilliant one. I still have to think, question, challenge and decide whether what comes back actually makes sense. But it can help me see an idea from a different angle, find the words I was looking for or turn a collection of thoughts into something I can actually work with.

For a woman at 50 who is becoming more aware of how she thinks and communicates, that’s useful.

And that brings me back to the question: if AI can help me think more clearly without doing the thinking for me, why wouldn’t that make midlife a little easier?

Older people in general are often underestimated when it comes to tech. I remember the early Internet and the “Silver Surfer” support groups. I now shudder at that headline I wrote. Reaching midlife did not mean helplessness online, yet society treated it that way. Today, I quietly glide past that condescension.

I use AI to brainstorm and plan, while others scroll, and swipe endlessly. Experience, not speed, is my advantage, and AI helps me use it efficiently.

Ads promising “AI for beginners” bombard me daily, as if a 50-year-old perimenopausal mum needs hand-holding. Perhaps it’s my rusty TikTok skills, or the algorithm’s assumption that my age equals incompetence. In reality, I’m already ahead, quietly making AI work for me in ways no beginner’s guide could teach. And yet, it still sometimes pauses over odd questions, reminding me that technology isn’t perfect, but neither am I.

At the end of the day, the thing we all need to remember is that nobody is reconnecting a landline, just as nobody is going back to using a typewriter … or life before the Internet or AI. Telling someone to stop using ChatGPT is like telling them to abandon a calculator or spellcheck now.

The only question is how you use it wisely to make your life more meaningful and so I’ve decided to embrace it strategically. It’s about thriving in a world that refuses to let us pause and take a breath.

Some dismiss AI because they don’t need it yet. That’s fine too. But for a woman at 50, decades of learning to think and problem-solve now combine with AI to produce surprising solutions.

We do not become less capable at 50. We just become savvier about how we use our mental energy. I use AI to keep my head above water and add a little pleasure back into my routines. But the one thing I wish it could help me with now is …. how to stop me walking out of Asda with an empty shopping basket and …. refrain from loading freshly cleaned glasses from the dishwasher into the fridge. Now those things are open to debate!

For me, AI isn’t about outsourcing my thinking. It is about creating enough space to actually use it. At 50, I have decades of experience, curiosity, mistakes, ideas and stories behind me. I don’t particularly want to throw all that away because technology has arrived.

One question I’m left with: how do we use AI to give ourselves more time to be human, rather than simply filling every spare minute with more technology?