#Unsettled

I met a girlfriend for lunch last week for a deeply overdue catch-up session. The second I saw her, I knew something was wrong—she looked completely exhausted, carrying that specific kind of heavy stress you can feel from across the room.

Over lunch, she confided in me. She had been cleaning her home office the day before, bumped her partner’s computer, and clicked it awake. What she found on the screen brought her to tears: hundreds of saved screenshots and folders of women in bikinis and lingerie. It was the digital “spank bank” so many modern women dread discovering.

She had taken photos of the screen on her phone and showed them to me. I asked if she recognized any of them. She didn’t. They were completely random. But as we looked closer at the collection together, a reality set in: Most of these women didn’t even look real. Because they weren’t.

They were AI images, or so heavily AI-enhanced that they had crossed the line from human to hologram.

It got me thinking about the bizarre era we are living in. In the professional world, we are constantly told that AI is taking over to “make our lives easier.” It writes emails, optimizes schedules, and automates our workloads. But while it might be saving us time in the office, I have to ask: Is it doing more harm than good to our souls?

Especially as women.

We already live in a culture where the pressure to maintain a flawless aesthetic is fierce. Botox, fillers, and plastic surgery have become the casual baseline. A girlfriend of mine who works at a med spa tells me she has girls in their early twenties coming in for preventative fillers. We are trying to alter our real, living flesh to match a digital reality that doesn’t exist.

You can scroll through Instagram and hit a page of a young woman who looks absolutely flawless. Pores? Gone. Symmetry? Perfect. Sometimes I’ll show these accounts to my fifteen-year-old daughter, and she will just look at me, completely unfazed, and say, “Mom, that’s AI. It’s fake. That person doesn’t even exist.”

And I’m left standing there wondering: How am I supposed to compete with a ghost?

I think of my single friends out there navigating the modern dating world. Is this what men are conditioning themselves to look for? An algorithmically perfect fantasy? (And to be fair, I know the tables are reversed—women are staring at impossible, Adonis standards of men, too.) But we are losing our grip on what a real human being looks like.

I fell into the trap myself just last fall. I was at a wedding, out on the dance floor with my girlfriends, having the absolute best time. When the photos came back a month later, I found a shot of myself dancing. I remembered exactly how joyful I felt in that moment. But I was wearing a short dress, and the second I looked at the photo, my joy vanished. I hated the way my thighs looked.

So, as a quiet experiment, I put that photo into an AI generator and asked it to make my legs look a little thinner.

The image it spit back out made my jaw drop. I stared at the screen and thought, Oh my gosh, who is that hot woman? For a fleeting second, the temptation was real. I wanted to post it. I really did. I wanted the world to see that version of me.

But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t real. And I am trying, with everything I have, to live my life as authentically as possible.

The truth is, as I navigate this middle-age phase of life, things don’t bounce back the way they used to. Gravity is real. Time is real. I’ll admit that lately, I’ve found myself avoiding the mirror because the reflection doesn’t always match the vibrant, youthful energy I feel on the inside. That’s my own insecurity getting the best of me, and I know for a fact I am not alone in it.

We have to decide right now to stop competing with a perceived reality.

If we don’t, humanity loses. We will spend our lives chasing a digital mirage, buffing away the very lines and curves that prove we have actually lived, loved, and danced.

I chose to delete the thinned-out AI photo. I’m keeping the real one. I know exactly who is in my circle, and I know who loves me for me—regardless of what my thighs look like in a snapshot (although, I am going to start incorporating squats back into my life). Let’s step off the digital hamster wheel and start choosing the beautifully flawed, entirely real people standing right in front of us.