It doesn’t surprise me, because ethics has always been something people see from afar. And in the case of AI, this technology has entered our lives at such a speed and in such a complete way that we are all a bit dizzy.

Let’s start with the word “ethics.”

Morals are cultural beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. Because they are cultural, we need to place them in a society at a specific moment in history: western society in the XXI Century, for example. Usually these beliefs are not open to debate. There is a consensus about them.

Ethics, on the other hand, implies a non-cultural conscience. Ethical issues are those that need external rules and norms that provide a framework for debate. The line between right and wrong is diffuse, and within the same society, at a specific time, different opinions co-exist.

But where do these principles come from?

In the early seventies, a series of misconduct cases in medical research affecting vulnerable populations were disclosed by American newspapers.

This prompted the National Research Act of 1974, which created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. They published the Belmont Report, where the basic ethical principles were defined. You can read more about those principles in this post.

From the very beginning, regulations around ethical issues involving technology have been difficult.

Carl Sagan was an American astronomer and science communicator. He popularized science with his TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

In his last interview, with Charlie Rose, in 1996, he said:

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”

These days I keep thinking about his words. Because the truth is, very few people really know and understand AI. And I am talking about the backend of these artificial intelligence tools, that space full of code, completely out of reach for the common user.

There is a general belief that AI is being regulated, and that is only partly true.

There are some vague and scattered regulations, mainly related to commercial compliance rules for the companies behind the bots, but very little regulation for the users.

Anyone can create a custom ChatGPT and sell it, probably with the best of intentions. But how can we be sure that this person has the capability to create an AI tool that is safe to use, and that will protect our personal information?

What about the consultants who are selling the complete automation of small business operations? And I am talking about small businesses specifically, because corporations have entire departments dedicated to studying this.

What happens with the founder who automated her day to day operations and shares the names and personal information of her clients with AI agents? What if there is a leak? Which regulation protects her? And her clients?

None. The truth is governance in AI is an illusion.

What you regulate today, tomorrow is no longer applicable.

And the most important thing: you cannot regulate what you cannot control.

I learned that many years ago, and it completely changed my approach to science and technology regulation.

In 2011, I was working on the legislation of Assisted Reproductive Techniques in Argentina. At that moment, it was the topic that had been debated for the longest time in Parliament. The first project was introduced in 1989.

During all those years, every attempt to pass a law failed.

This time there was some urgency, because the techniques were widely used but very expensive. Medical insurances refused to cover the practice, and that created a constitutional problem, because equal access was not guaranteed.

At the end of one of the many hearings where I was presenting the new project, one of the attendants came to me and said: “You can regulate anything you want, but I am on my own in the lab.”

That was an aha moment for me. Because he was right. Once the door of his lab was closed, there was nothing we could control, and therefore nothing to regulate.

I went back to Congress and told the legislators we needed to narrow the scope of the assisted reproductive techniques regulation if we wanted a law that could actually be passed and applied. So we focused on access, and we got our law.

Imagine the situation with AI. It is so out of our reach that the only thing we can do is self-regulate.

When we upload to our AI tool the Zoom call we had with a prospective client, should we anonymize it first? Or even better, should we ask this client if she wants to be recorded?

Or, if we want transparency, should we add a policy to our website or publication that states clearly how we use AI?

And what about pricing? Should a product created by AI cost the same as a product crafted entirely by a human? This is not a question that comes from my imagination, it is a question I was asked a few weeks ago, and that I answered not by giving my personal opinion (that I have), but my expert opinion, based on the ethical framework I created using bioethics principles as a baseline. And my answer gave this creative the confidence to price her work in a way that was aligned with her values.

Today, having an ethical position on the way to use AI is a competitive advantage.

I said above that governance is an illusion. The same is true of being AI free.

This is not the same situation as not having TV in the house, or refusing the use of mobile phones.

Unless you are living in complete isolation, even if you think you are AI free because you don’t use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini or any LLM out there, you are still using AI.

Every time you google, most of the interaction with your bank, when you fill a governmental form, when you ask a question in the client support message form on any platform, during all of these actions you are using AI, in a passive role, but still.

That is the reason that when I hear someone say that “they are not using AI at all”, I feel a bit uncomfortable, because I know they are not aware of all those passive interactions that happen every day. And that makes me think, what other thing are they ignoring?

It is much better to take a pragmatic stance on AI that doesn’t compromise your values and creates trust at the same time.

When the COVID-19 pandemic appeared, I called it “The Paradox of Technology.” Because we were all isolated in our homes due to the propagation of a virus that, thanks to the technology available, could cross the world in 24 hours. And at the same time, we were connected globally like never before. Also thanks to technology.

Today we are facing a new paradox. AI is the most widely shared technology in history. The one that touches every individual, even those who are not active users, because we are all passive users. And in a world full of international regulatory organizations, the ethical use of AI relies on each of us, as individuals.

There is no global institution that can guarantee the ethical use of AI.

It’s up to you. It’s up to me. It’s up to us.

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PS. If you want to know more about ethical principles, visit The AI Ethics Studio and download your free copy of The Little Book of AI Ethics.

And if you want to go deeper into the conversation, this is the moment to upgrade to an Annual Paid Subscription at 50% off, and get access to a full 60-minute one to one Foundation Call with me, where we can talk about your business, your publication, and everything you want to know about AI Ethics.

This offer is only available for a limited time to annual subscribers of The Creative Advocate: a 60-minute one to one Foundation Call (valued at $298) for $40.

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ATMs have been around for more than fifty years, and they are a great invention because they allow us to withdraw and deposit money even when the bank is closed.

For a long time they coexisted with cashiers, who were available during bank opening hours.

Around fifteen years ago, banks in Argentina started pushing clients to do all their banking through ATMs, even during opening hours.

By that time I had already been a client of my bank for more than a decade, and was familiar with all the staff. We were not friends, but we had the kind of familiarity that comes from years of seeing each other a couple of times a week.

I had no problem using the ATM. The only issue was that deposits were made using envelopes, so they did not appear credited in your account immediately. When the bank closed, a clerk would open the ATM and manually enter the deposit amount into your account.

One day I needed the money to be credited immediately, so I went straight to the cashier to make the deposit.

This man, whom I had known for so many years, who used to tell me stories about his children and also knew stories about my life, refused to do it and sent me to the ATM.

I explained the particular situation and told him why I needed the money to be available immediately.

He stayed firm and kept saying that it was bank policy.

I was not angry. I was shocked.

He treated me like I was a complete stranger.

He acted like a machine, not very different from the ATM.

At one point, I realized there was no point continuing the conversation, but before heading to the ATM, I told him:

“I believe you when you say that you are following bank policy, and I am not surprised. Banks are all about money. And I am sure maintaining an ATM is much cheaper than paying your salary, and with this attitude you are just showing them that you are replaceable. So when they fire you, remember that YOU were the one who made yourself replaceable.”

A few months later, he was made redundant.

And for bank clients like myself, it made no difference.

He trained us to believe that dealing with the ATM was as good as dealing with him.

He stripped himself of the most valuable ingredient of a service and professional relationship:

Personal touch.

Machines are cheaper than humans.

And with AI, the situation is even worse, because previous technologies usually affected certain industries.

AI affects everything.

It is inside every household and affects all of us.

I do not know what you do, so I do not have an answer to your question.

But I can tell you a few things about AI, and you can make your own conclusion.

All the answers and ideas that AI can give you come from something that a human wrote or said and that became part of the data AI uses.

So if you want originality, do not look for that in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever tool you are using, because you will only get a codified copy of something that someone else thought before.

Whenever I am brainstorming an idea with AI and try to go deeper, it becomes impossible.

I get the same robotic suggestions every time.

And if there is something I learned after almost thirty years of working in the world of ideas, it is that everything is in the detail.

Hallucinations are more common than people realize, and you have to stay alert because even if you point out the mistake, AI quickly enters a loop of contradictions.

It cannot “read the room”, only code.

And that leaves out a lot of information that matters when making decisions.

And this takes me to my last point.

I started this post with a real story, and I will end it talking about a movie.

Last week, I rewatched Working Girl, the 1988 movie about a young and ambitious secretary, Tess (Melanie Griffith), who wants a career in finance.

She has a business degree from night school but is not accepted by the corporate system because of her working class background.

She shares an idea with her boss, the entitled Katherine (Sigourney Weaver), who tells her she is going to study the proposal.

But Tess finds out that Katherine plans to present the idea to investors as her own.

While Katherine is out of town, Tess gets in touch with Jack (Harrison Ford), a financial adviser who is also dating Katherine.

Together, they present the idea.

But Katherine storms into the meeting and tells everybody that Tess is a fraud who stole the idea from her.

In the following scene, we see Tess leaving her office, defeated, at the same time Katherine, Jack, and the investors arrive at the building to close the deal.

Tess stands by her story. Jack backs her up.

And when Katherine pushes the investors into the elevator, Tess shouts:

“Ask her to tell you about the hole in your deal.”

The biggest investor steps out of the elevator and Tess finally gets the chance to explain how she came up with the idea.

When the investor asks Katherine how she came up with it, Katherine has no answer.

And her lie is exposed.

I do not want to spoil the happy ending, and I highly recommend watching the film.

It is very interesting to see how different the world was regarding technology, and how little has changed when it comes to women and class privilege.

But that is a topic for another post.

What I want to point out is that you can think of AI as Katherine.

We are living through challenging times.

Job certainty is a thing of the past.

But do not make it easy for AI to replace you.

Own your story.

Own your voice.

Own your point of view.

Own your strategic thinking.

But most importantly, keep your personal and human touch in whatever you do.

We have souls, and that is impossible to replace.

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PS. If you want to know more about ethical principles, visit The AI Ethics Studio and download your free copy of The Little Book of AI Ethics.

And if you want to go deeper into the conversation, this is the moment to upgrade to an Annual Paid Subscription at 50% off, and get access to a full 60-minute one to one Foundation Call with me, where we can talk about your business, your publication, and everything you want to know about AI Ethics.

This offer is only available for a limited time to annual subscribers of The Creative Advocate: a 60-minute one to one Foundation Call (valued at $298) for $40.

I would love to have this conversation with you. Go ahead and upgrade your subscription.

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And honestly, it did not surprise me.

I loved her novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette. And still, it is one of those rare cases where I prefer the film to the book. Maybe because the movie has scenes of such beauty that they leave you completely breathless. I wrote about exactly that in one of my very first posts here.

The novel, and the film, are also about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. A theme that hits close to home.

Yesterday I recommended the novel to , a brand designer who does beauty like no other, and the mother of two lovely girls, one of them a newborn.

And as I was thinking about it, I realised two things at once: this weekend is Mother’s Day in the US, and when I first published that post two years ago, I had five subscribers.

A lot has happened since then. I launched my online consulting, moved to Barcelona, and many new readers have joined this little corner.

So I decided to republish it. No editing. Because some posts deserve a second chance.

I hope you enjoy it, and I wish a very Happy Mother’s Day to all my American readers!

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Why I think beauty is underrated.

Last night, I rewatched Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the film adaptation of Maria Semple’s novel. Interestingly, it’s one of those rare cases where I prefer the movie to the book. This preference might come from the novel’s epistolary format, which I’ve never been particularly fond of.

The story resonates with me on multiple levels, so much so that I could easily write an essay about it. Yet, there’s one scene that consistently moves me. In this scene, Bernadette and her daughter, Bee, are in the car, singing Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time.” Out of nowhere, Bernadette starts crying and tells Bee, “I just need you to know how hard it is for me sometimes.” When Bee asks, “What’s hard?” Bernadette responds, “The banality of life. But I retain the right to be incredibly moved by those little things that no one notices.”

I believe what brings Bernadette and me to tears isn’t the banality of life but its beauty. Singing in the car with her daughter to lyrics like, “If you’re lost, you can look, and you will find me, time after time. If you fall, I will catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time,” and understanding that they will always seek and find each other, it’s a moment of such profound beauty that it’s almost unbearable.

This sense of beauty is also present in the movie’s opening scene, where Bernadette is alone, surrounded by the deep blue waters and white icebergs of Antarctica. The image is so stunning, it literally takes my breath away.

I’ve watched the movie countless times before, but this is the first time I’ve connected it to beauty. I believe this shift happened because recently I have started to seek beauty actively, not only in grand moments but also in the everyday: the early morning songs of birds, the delicate blooming of cherry blossoms, the soothing scent of lavender in the park.

This deliberate choice to surround myself with beauty had a transformative effect. Much like the theory that once you buy a blue car, you start noticing blue cars everywhere, my newfound focus on beauty made it appear more frequently in my life. I began to see beauty not just as an external visual condition, but as a multisensory experience that enriches our lives. Beauty can be seen, heard, felt, and even thought. Ideas, too, can possess a certain elegance and grace that we find beautiful.

The importance of beauty in our lives is often undervalued. We think of beauty as something to be consumed or owned, a luxury rather than a necessity. But beauty’s true value lies in its ability to evoke emotion, inspire creativity, and foster a sense of connection. In moments of hardship, beauty can offer solace and hope. It reminds us that even in the darkest times, there are still things worth appreciating and celebrating.

We know that Bernadette used to be a famous and iconic architect, but on the cruise that takes her to Antarctica, she describes herself as a “creative problem solver with good taste.”

I think that description fits me perfectly. I used to introduce myself as a policymaker, but I think policy designer is closer to my work. Designing involves creative thinking and the ability to implement the best solution to a specific problem.

I listened to an interview with Maria Semple, where she mentioned that the idea for the novel came after a conversation she had with a friend, sometime after a failed first novel and her move from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city she used to hate and blame for all the misfortunes in her life. After listening to her monologue of complaints, the friend told her: “Maria, you are a writer, you must write in order not to become a menace to society.” Around this phrase, she created Bernadette’s character and story.

In fact, there is a scene in which Bernadette meets with an old friend and colleague, and he tells her: “People like you must create; if you don’t, you become a menace to society.”

Like Maria Semple, Bernadette moved to Seattle after a big blow. Her major creative project was destroyed by a repugnant magnate who transformed her work of art into a car park.

In another interview, Semple explained: “At the beginning of the book, the character [Bernadette] was stuck, and it would end when she moved forward and became an artist again.”

I was stuck for many years, and it was my therapist, the kindest and smartest woman I have ever met, who suggested that I should watch the movie.

It was October 2019, almost four years after my most beloved career project was destroyed by horrible people with very bad taste. The difference between me and Bernadette was that, for the outside world, I had moved on. But it was a facade. Publicly, I was okay, working as usual, teaching at the university, traveling. But inside my house and in my therapist’s room, the story was different. I couldn’t let go. I blamed the country, the political system, the media that kept silent, and the colleagues who continued with their lives. I stopped reading the papers and watching the local news; my TV was always tuned to CNN, BBC, or Sky News. I read only books written in English. I limited my social contact to the minimum.

And then the pandemic arrived. From the very beginning, I was furious with how the authorities managed the crisis, but I found a creative way to express my opinion. I presented a paper at the 31st Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference: Virginia Woolf and Ethics. In my presentation, I read Mrs. Dalloway as a post-pandemic novel, highlighting the effects that bad decisions by governments and experts could have on each individual person. This was a turning point in my life because I realized I couldn’t continue as part of a system I despised. I quit my job, taking the first step on a journey with an unknown destination, but moving forward.

Like Bernadette, I have a daughter, my perfect English Rose, as I like to call her. We never sang in the car because I don’t drive, but we have been through countless adventures together.

In September 2022, she started her master’s degree in Paris. She wanted me to join her, and I did. The first year in Paris was very difficult. Awful is a more accurate word to describe the experience.

I think things started to change last Christmas. I was crossing the Pont Neuf with my daughter; it was already very dark. A woman opened a little suitcase in the middle of the Pont, took out a microphone, and started to sing. A man passing by stopped and started to dance. They ended up dancing together. It was beautiful, and it felt good.

Beauty is far from being a mere luxury; it is an essential experience that enriches our lives and helps us navigate through challenges. By choosing to see and appreciate the beauty around us, we can find deeper meaning and joy in our everyday lives. Beauty, in all its forms, is indeed underrated, and it is time we recognize its true value.

Today, my daughter sent her master’s dissertation. She has formally completed her education. Since the moment she was born, my goal in life was to pave the path for her to grow and become whatever she wanted. Goal achieved!

The Paris adventure is coming to an end. I still haven’t decided on the new destination. I have only one condition: it has to be a beautiful place.

Maybe Antarctica... Together as always. Time after time. The beauty of life.

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AI is not just a tool. It is a new technological revolution. It enters every household and affects almost every aspect of our lives, including our jobs.

But I think we need to be aware of the difference between three things:

talking about AI the way we do with friends and colleagues over coffee,

expressing a personal opinion on AI,

and offering an expert opinion.

Informal conversation allows us to comment freely and lightly, without any kind of inhibition.

When we express an opinion, we should probably be more careful, because people will assume that what we say is what we stand for.

Expert opinion is the kind that is grounded in facts and verified information.

Being able to recognize the difference between these three levels of communication is key.

Let us analyze the recent controversy between ChatGPT and Claude.

In the last few months, many people switched to Claude, usually saying things like “it is better for writing” or “it is better for research.” We can place those explanations in the personal opinion category.

More recently, we are seeing people move to Claude because of the “governmental contracts” affair, based on the premise that Anthropic stands on ethical principles, and proved it by not signing the contract.

But what about the Claude Design and Figma affair? Have you heard about that?

Figma is the go-to design platform for professional designers. The Anthropic Chief Product Officer resigned from the Figma board three days before the release of Claude Design, a new tool that competes directly with Figma.

Nobody knows the whole story, but there is a clear conflict of interest here. As a board member of Figma, Anthropic’s CPO had access to critical information that is now available to a direct Figma competitor. And that raises a question:

Is Anthropic as ethical as people think?

You could argue that signing an ethically suspicious contract with the most powerful government in the world is not the same as mishandling information with competitors. But here is the thing: there are no levels of ethical conduct. You either act ethically or you do not.

If Anthropic stands for ethical principles, it should not allow a conflict of interest situation. Full stop.

That is why I think bioethics principles are so useful when we think about the use of AI.

I wrote about this before, and you can read my thoughts here.

But let me give you some clear examples of how these principles work in our daily lives.

Autonomy

This principle is about the capacity to make a free choice based on relevant information.

A few weeks ago, I was on a Zoom meeting where a writing coach said she did not use AI at all, because she felt that as a creative, using AI was not right. I understand her point. But if she were my client, I would have told her: drop the “at all”. The truth is, sometimes we use AI without even knowing it. So, if she wants to make a stand, she could say “I do not voluntarily use AI in my work.” That way she makes her point while being accurate.

Beneficence and non-maleficence

This principle is all about “do not harm.”

I tested a custom AI tool and found it was giving me wrong data and even attributed work to me that I did not do. I immediately contacted the developer to let her know, and let us just say this person did not understand the seriousness of the situation. Attributing intellectual work to someone other than the actual author is deeply unethical. I am sure the developer meant no harm. But a product should not be available until that problem is fixed.

The bottom line: you need to be an expert to create an AI tool.

Justice

This principle asks us to consider the impact of our choices beyond ourselves. How does the way we use AI affect others?

Think about the example above. We have someone distributing an imperfect AI tool that could cause real moral harm, including plagiarism.

Bioethics principles draw a line and set limits that cannot be crossed, helping us recognize whether we are using AI responsibly.

So, how can we be responsible AI users?

By choosing carefully. Not only the tools we use, but also whose opinions we listen to.

When it comes to something as serious as AI, we need to listen to experts and learn from them. We should base our decisions on trustworthy information. And we must understand that when it comes to ethics, there are no blurred lines.

Situations like the one with Anthropic and Figma damage transparency, and they are just as serious as the OpenAI contract with the government.

Praising Anthropic for refusing the government contract on ethical grounds, and then staying silent about the Figma conflict of interest, is not consistent. You cannot pick and choose which ethical failures count.

Understanding that is our only protection in an AI era that is here to stay and moves fast.

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Nobody mentioned it when you stayed late, waited patiently for the promotion that was surely coming, softened your language so as not to seem too much, too direct, too ambitious. Nobody handed you a bill. But the tax was being collected the whole time.

I call it the Good Girl Tax. And I know it intimately, because I paid it for decades.

I spent more than twenty five years as a lawyer, bioethicist and political strategist, working at the highest levels of policy and legislation. I was not on the outside looking in. I was in the room. Which is exactly how I learned that the system does not fail women by accident. It fails them by design.

The Good Girl Tax is not a single moment. It is an accumulation. It is every time you made yourself smaller to make someone else more comfortable.

Every time you framed your idea as a question so it would land more gently. Every time you took the meeting, wrote the report, mentored the junior colleague, organised the event, and then watched someone else get the credit, the title, the salary, the visibility.

The Good Girl Tax is not only paid in visibility. It is paid in positioning, in money, and in time, which is the one thing you cannot get back.

One day you wake up in your fifties and see it clearly: you have spent decades building authority for others. And when you finally do what you should have done years earlier, when you stand up and ask for what you have earned, what your expertise and your work clearly justify, the system delivers its final insult. It tells you nobody cares who you are. And it leaves you with nothing.

The Good Girl Tax shows up differently depending on where you are in your career.

For the woman inside a corporation, it looks like being passed over for a promotion that went to someone less qualified and less experienced. It looks like being described as “not quite ready” by people who have never questioned their own readiness for a single day in their lives. It looks like being given more responsibility and less recognition, in a ratio that somehow always works out in the organisation’s favour.

For the woman building her own business, the tax looks different but costs just as much. It is the inability to charge what the work is worth because something learned long before you had a business says that asking for too much is dangerous. It is the endless softening of the offer before it goes out into the world.

I know both versions of this tax.

The Good Girl Tax is not a confidence problem. It is a positioning problem. And positioning has a solution.

The first step is naming it. Seeing it clearly for what it is, not a personal failing, not a lack of ambition, not something to fix with another course or another year of patient waiting. It is a structural pattern, and like all structural patterns, once you can see it, you can change it.

Most of the women I work with arrived not knowing they have been paying this tax. They just knew something was wrong. Some are still inside organisations, done waiting for a system that was never going to reward them the way they deserved. Others are building their own business and learning, as I did, that freedom does not automatically come with leaving. It comes with understanding what you are leaving, and why.

What changes is not their capability. They were always capable. What changes is the strategy around that capability. The positioning. The clarity on where they are, what the system has been doing, and precisely how to stop paying a tax that was never theirs to pay in the first place.

You have done your part. The debt is not yours. It never was.

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P.S. If this resonated, I would love to hear your version of the Good Girl Tax in the comments.

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We both felt a connection with the characters. Like Lorelai, I became a single mother when my daughter was just a year old, and like Rory, she grew up with an unconventional mother.

When talking about Gilmore Girls, people usually think about Lorelai and Rory, but there is a third one…Emily.

I always liked her, partly because I admire Kelly Bishop, who brought her to life. She’s one of those actors who can express everything with just a look, without a word.

But it was in the show’s revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, the four extended episodes released in 2016, that Emily truly became my favourite Gilmore Girl. The reason is simple: she evolved. I use the word “evolved” intentionally because Emily’s journey wasn’t just about change; it was about empowerment. Across each episode, representing a different season, we saw her become not a different person, but a better one.

In Winter, the first episode, we meet an Emily struggling to come to terms with her husband’s death after fifty years of marriage. In Spring and Summer, we see her move through deep sadness and chaos. She tries to declutter her life following Marie Kondo’s philosophy, briefly consults a therapist, and even loses her temper at her private club’s board meetings. Emily had reached a point where she no longer had patience for nonsense or time for pretenses. She said exactly what she thought, with no filters whatsoever. As she walks out of the club, she exclaims: “I can’t do it anymore…I can’t spend any more time and energy on artifice and bullshit…This whole thing is dead to me, anyhow. It died with Richard.”

I get her. When my own mother died, a few months after I’d quit my job and moved to Paris, I went through something similar. Sadness, then chaos, and zero tolerance for anything superficial.

One of the most defining aspects of “evolving” is how it brings self-awareness alongside transformation. As we evolve, our truest essence steps forward. We might feel different, but we’re actually more ourselves. Evolving inevitably leads us to the best versions of who we are.

In the final episode, Fall, we find Emily moving to Nantucket. She opens her home to an immigrant family, treating them as her own, and spends her time at the Whaling Museum, likely as a volunteer.

At the Museum, she shares the harsh realities of whale hunting with the families in attendance, happily terrifying them and reviving that sharp sense of humour she’s always had.

Even though she may look different now, following her story shows she’s still the Emily who, despite her flaws, was always there for Lorelai. She’d tried, over and over, to do things the “right” way but often got caught in the demands and traps of her social world. In Nantucket, she’s finally free from those conventions, embracing a new way of life.

Another sign of evolution is simplicity. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but believe me, it’s incredibly difficult to be simple, not just for individuals, but for societies, too.

Do you think we’ve evolved as a society over the last 150 years? The easy answer seems to be yes! We’ve conquered space, achieved remarkable scientific and technological advances, become globally connected… Yet in 2020, we were taken by surprise by a virus and couldn’t prevent millions of deaths, just as in the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. A hundred years apart, armed with vast knowledge, and still, the same outcome. This suggests that despite our advances, we haven’t truly evolved as a society. If evolution means becoming better, well, we haven’t.

This is where simplicity, as a mark of true evolution, comes into play, and it’s embodied by the Emily we see in Nantucket. Her home is a model of clean, unadorned sophistication: white walls and furniture, and large windows framing the ocean. And Emily herself embraces this simplicity, minimal makeup, comfortable clothes. The moment she slips off her luxury shoes for simple white sneakers says it all. She has chosen to live in a way that feels more authentic to her.

When Emily tells Lorelai that she’s selling her house, Lorelai is outraged, even as Emily explains her reasons and shares how much she tried to make the house feel like home without Richard. Seeing Lorelai’s intense reaction, Emily adds, “People move all the time.” Lorelai responds, “Not you.” With her characteristic wisdom, Emily replies, “Sometimes life forces your hand.” And she’s right. Sometimes we choose change; other times, we have no option, and if we want to move forward, we have to embrace it.

But as I said, evolving hasn’t changed Emily’s essence; it has amplified it. We see this in the way she buys her Nantucket house, a place that was not even on the market! She tells Lorelai, with a playful smile: “I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.” And she delights in explaining that, for the first time, something is entirely in her name. Her new home says:

“Owner: Emily Gilmore.”

With that one line, she’s telling us she finally owns her life, and it reminds us that we can own ours.

I wrote about fighting ageism a few weeks ago, and one of the best ways to do it is by evolving, like Emily did.

She could have stayed in her old house, feeling lonely, irrelevant, and living off memories, but she chose to bring meaning into her new life.

She helped people in need, found a volunteer job she enjoyed, and, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, she finally “has a room of her own.”

She found her place, and fully occupies it.

This works in life, and in careers as well.

Time won’t stop. Seasons will come and go.

And as the song said:

“But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want or you can just get old”

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I’ve always been a big fan of Nancy Meyers, and her film Something’s Gotta Give was a real inspiration. The idea of being a successful woman in her fifties, living in a beautiful beach house, was incredibly appealing. And at forty nine, I felt like I was getting close.

I didn’t have the beach house, but I was at the peak of my professional and academic career. I had financial stability, I was apartment hunting for a bigger place, and I was planning to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in London with my daughter.

Then, four days before I turned fifty, I was fired.

I never saw it coming. After a decade at the National Senate, the best years of my career, my entire department, Human Rights, was dismissed by a new government.

To say I was in shock would be an understatement. I was shattered, completely destroyed, and unable to react for weeks. The London trip was cancelled. So was I.

People offered kind words, but no help. No one wanted to get involved. I was left completely on my own.

I was known as the bioethicist who drafted laws. Without my job, who was I?

I lost my sense of identity and belonging.

Even the smallest parts of my routine were affected. Since I was a teenager, I had always started my day the same way: breakfast alone, reading the papers, listening to Joni Mitchell. It was the most special moment of my day. I didn’t even use an alarm clock. I just waited for the sound of the newspaper landing at the door.

But suddenly, I couldn’t read the papers anymore. Most of them supported the layoffs. The rest stayed silent. That hurt.

Not exactly the kind of plot you’d expect in a Nancy Meyers movie.

Ironically, as soon as my dismissal became official, I was offered a job by the same people who had fired me. But here’s the twist: the offer came with half the salary and no contract, and I said yes.

Why? Because I had a strategy.

First, I wanted to show continuity in my career. This is key whether you want to find another job or build a business of your own.

Second, I needed time to wait for the right opportunity to arrive, and then resign. “Laid off” looks bad on a résumé. “Resigned” looks much better.

Third, I had a daughter in college to support.

And fourth, and most importantly, I wanted to regain control. I wanted to be the one who decided how and when to leave.

It wasn’t easy, but I held on and waited for the opportunity. A year and a half later, it came: the perfect job offer. I resigned with immediate effect.

The new job was great, even better than the one I had lost, but something was missing. I had recovered my dignity, but not my joy.

By the time the pandemic hit, I was already familiar with online learning. After my dismissal, I had taken a course in Literature and Mental Health from the University of Warwick. During lockdown, I joined reading groups, creative writing workshops, and studied Literary Translation. Without even noticing, I was opening up my options.

In 2021, just as life was settling back into something resembling normal, another election disrupted my career. This time they didn’t fire me, but they wanted to transfer me to a position I did not agree with.

So I quit. And I joined my daughter in Paris, where she was studying.

It wasn’t easy. Moving to France was, let’s just say, a challenge.

For example, I went to the hairdresser and asked for a frange à la Parisienne. Apparently, my French was not Parisian enough, and to my horror, I walked out looking like a member of an ’80s pop band.

Which is kind of poetic, because back in the ’80s, when I was a teenager, my dream was to be a writer living in Paris.

And there I was, living in the heart of the 16th arrondissement, looking, magically, eighteen again.

Paris didn’t quite work, so two years ago I moved to Barcelona and, at the same time, launched The Creative Advocate on Substack.

That was a turning point, because while designing my publication, I discovered the world of branding, design, and copywriting. I devoured everything I could find on the subject, took courses, and replaced my usual literary podcasts with branding ones.

I also realized that all those years as a legislative advisor, I had been a strategist and a copywriter. The difference was the goal. When you work as a strategist for a brand, your objective is to convert clients. When you draft a law, your goal is to gain votes.

That revelation was the beginning of my solopreneur career, and that’s how I found my new identity:

A lawyer, bioethicist, and former political advisor who turned all her experience and expertise into helping women who are tired of being invisible take the next step and stand out, whether within their organizations or by building businesses of their own.

If nothing else, I know one thing for sure: now I’m the one making the decisions, and I’m never giving that power away again.

If you're in the middle of this right now, I want you to know: the shock is real, the fear is real, and the identity loss is real. But so is what comes after. Because at some point, and you will know exactly when, you stop waiting for someone to decide your future, and you start deciding it yourself.

And that moment is closer than you think.

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P.S. This post is an edited and updated version of a previous one published with the titled: Fifty and Fired.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ageism is unfair treatment of people because of their age.

For the World Health Organization, ageism refers to the stereotypes (how we think), prejudice (how we feel), and discrimination (how we act) towards others or ourselves based on age.

The WHO also says:

Ageism affects everyone… people draw on cultural age stereotypes to perceive and understand themselves, which can result in self-directed ageism at any age.

As usual, I disagree with the WHO. I tend to think that ageism, especially in the workplace, though not exclusively, affects mostly women over 50.

My personal definition of ageism is much simpler. Only two words:

Invisibility + Irrelevance.

Before you see it, you feel it.

That promotion that was supposed to be yours, and suddenly goes to someone else, usually younger. That meeting you were not invited to. That opinion that was ignored.

Small hints here and there.

I have heard not dozens, but hundreds of stories about these situations: women who faced them once they turned 50, and sometimes even in their forties.

Some women accept the situation and keep going because they think that way they preserve their stability. Personally, I think job stability is a fantasy today, but I also believe that all opinions are valid.

Other women fight back. Each in her own style, but all of them leaving their comfort zone to do it.

Five examples of women who fought back to stay visible and relevant, successfully:

Anna Wintour, the corporate woman

Love her or hate her.

When everybody thought she was retiring after leaving her post as editor-in-chief of Vogue, a position she held from 1988 to 2025, it was announced that she had been promoted to global chief content officer and artistic director at Condé Nast.

Far from being irrelevant, at 76 years old she is still the most influential voice in the fashion industry.

I wrote about her before, and how I think her attitude is key to her positioning.

She works for a corporation, but she acts like she is the super boss. Everything about her says: You don’t mess with me.

We know very little about her private life. She hardly ever talks about her family or relationships.

Her signature is authority, and she is not afraid to use it.

Isabelle Huppert, the chameleonic actress

Isabelle Huppert is the most important French actress of today.

I had the opportunity to see her on stage, and it is incredible how this woman, who is only 1.57 meters tall, takes up all the space. Her presence is impossible to ignore.

She appears as herself in Season 3, Episode 4 of the Netflix series Call My Agent!

In that episode she is portrayed as a woman who breaks all the rules, something I suspect she does in real life too.

In the French film L’ Avenir (Things to Come), she plays a successful professor and academic writer faced with ageism, at work and at home. Her publishers abandon her, and so does her husband, for a younger woman.

If Call My Agent! is funny, this film is a bit sad.

She is not playing a version of herself. She plays Nathalie, a woman who did not see ageism coming and was hit by it, like most women.

At 73, Huppert not only remains the leading actress in France, she is also one of the official ambassadors of Balenciaga.

She is more than relevant. She is an icon.

Like Anna Wintour, she keeps her personal life very private.

Stevie Nicks, the singer, songwriter, poet, artist

I am very biased when it comes to Stevie Nicks. I have been listening to her since I was a teenager.

If Joni Mitchell taught me how to love, I learned how to be strong by listening to Stevie.

Unlike Anna Wintour and Isabelle Huppert, she really spilled the tea.

We know absolutely everything about her tumultuous love relationships, her problems with drugs, and the wild years of Fleetwood Mac.

Anyone who has seen the video of her performing Silver Springs and staring at Lindsey Buckingham while singing, “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you,” knows that she is a scary woman.

And that is not a bad thing.

She is fearless. She stands by herself, her opinions, and her choices, not only the romantic ones.

In 2020, she released her song Show Them the Way, where she openly expressed her position on human rights and social justice.

Every time I listen to the lyrics, or watch the video, I feel the kind of sisterhood that is very rare to find.

At 77, she is still touring, still doing the “Edge Walk”, and she has inspired several Barbie dolls.

Scandalous, always. Controversial, sometimes. Irrelevant, never.

Bonnie Garmus, the creative director, now writer.

I have to mention Bonnie Garmus because not only she, but also the main character of her novel Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, have been a huge source of inspiration and support for me in the last three years.

Garmus has said many times that Elizabeth Zott was born out of a bad day at the office.

She began writing Lessons in Chemistry after a meeting where she was the only woman in the room and her ideas were dismissed, only to be reintroduced by a male colleague as his own.

After the meeting, she was supposed to review some work, but she was so angry that when she got back to her desk, she wrote the first chapter of the book instead.

She was fueled by anger.

She called it “constructive anger.”

I love that concept, because we tend to see anger as something negative, but sometimes anger is the only rational emotion, and it is what pushes us forward.

She wrote the novel in her early sixties and became a bestseller at 64. But before that, her first manuscript was rejected 98 times.

When she was asked what kept her going, she said that she was the only one who could say: It is over. And she was right.

Today she is 68, and her next novel will be published in October.

She is not over at all.

Catharine MacKinnon, the lawyer and academic.

Catharine MacKinnon is an American feminist lawyer.

Her work has influenced me enormously, and it inspired some of the legislation I drafted and pushed.

Her work focuses on women’s rights, and it has caused a great deal of controversy.

But she has always stood by her ideas and principles.

As with Anna Wintour: love her or hate her.

I tend to love her.

At 79, she is still teaching at Harvard, writing, and lecturing around the world.

Very visible. Very relevant.

I have shown you five women from very diverse backgrounds who have defied ageism and stayed visible and relevant within a system designed to push them into the shadows.

They are very different, but if we look closely, we can see what they have in common:

• They choose what to say, and what to keep private.

• They are not afraid of controversy.

• They have a point of view, and they speak up.

• They break the rules if necessary.

• They provoke strong emotions.

• They use anger in their favor.

• Invisibility and irrelevance are not options for them.

Last week was the birthday of a dear friend of mine.

The kind of friend you can talk to about anything.

She is a lawyer too, and even if we do not have the same style, we do share high standards when it comes to work.

I used to joke and tell her, “Let’s run fast, so mediocrity doesn’t catch up with us.”

I think we are at a stage in our lives where we do not need to run anymore.

We have already proved our value.

Now it is time to hold our place and own our authority.

To stand out.

Invisibility is not our thing.

Irrelevance? No way.

We are ready for the next step, and success is the only option.

After all, ageism in 2026 looks so old!

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P.S. Happy Birthday My Friend!!!

Strategy by design for those ready to take the next step and stand out.

The Creative Advocate is where creativity, ethics, culture, and strategy meet real life.

It’s a space for those 45 and beyond, who have built careers, navigated complexity, and are now asking a different kind of question:

What’s my next move and how do I design it on my own terms?

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This Substack began as a cultural magazine.

Today, it has evolved into something more intentional, more aligned with my work.

The shift began when I wrote a post about a 21st-Century Cinderella, and I realized that I needed to go deeper into my purpose: helping women positioned themselves and stand out.

I write about power and how it actually works, business and strategic positioning, AI ethics and the future we’re shaping, culture, influence, and decision-making, and designing your next chapter with clarity and agency.

This is not about reinvention through positive thinking.
It’s about:

precision,

knowing what matters,

what doesn’t,

and how to move accordingly.

The story behind the story

The Cinderella Story is by far my favourite post. I had so much fun writing it, and it really captures how I see the world.

What I didn’t realise while writing it is that Cinderella is me. Not the fairy tale about a princess, but the story of a woman in the 21st-Century.

Like Cinderella, I was left by my ex-husband, not in my forties but in my late twenties.

I also watched male colleagues, less capable than me, being promoted while I stayed behind.

The pandemic became a major turning point in my life. I realised that everything I had worked for and believed in for decades was, in many ways, a lie.

As a bioethicist and legislative advisor, watching governments and international institutions mismanage the biggest global crisis of our time with such a level of ignorance was too much for me.

In 2022, I quit my job, moved to Paris, launched The Creative Advocate (then called Books and Ethics), and began my solopreneur adventure.

You can read more about my journey in Nothing Went Exactly According to Plan.

Now I’m based in Barcelona, but as Virginia Woolf once wrote:

As a woman, my country is the whole world.

My background as a political strategist, bioethicist, and copywriter, defines the lens through which I approach ideas and decisions.

I don’t believe in surface-level advice or generic frameworks.

I believe in clarity over noise, strategy over urgency, and ethics over shortcuts.

And I’m deeply influenced by the idea that women must think critically about power, independence, and the structures we operate within.

If this resonates, I invite you to join the conversation.

Subscribe to receive essays, strategic insights, and reflections designed to support your next move on your terms.

You have different subscriptions options and benefits:

• Free A weekly essay on power, strategy, and what it actually takes to build authority. Plus instant access to Discover Your Space, a 42-page workbook to simplify your offers, sharpen your message, and move forward with clarity.

• Monthly Paid Everything above, plus The Design Your Life Blueprint, a strategic framework for designing your next chapter on your own terms.

• Annual Paid Everything above, plus a private 60-minute Foundation Call with me (valued at $298). We clarify your direction, identify what is holding you back, and map your next strategic steps.

• Founding Member Everything above, plus a 90-minute strategic working session (valued at $348), where we go deeper into your positioning, your decisions, and the authority you are ready to build.

Can’t wait to meet you all!

Warmest,

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Table of content:

• Transformation over Transaction.

• Message in a painting.

• Power and Justice

• AI and Ethics.

• Stop, look, listen and think.

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Transformation over Transaction.

Today I read a post by Andi Bitay about the trap of the “low ticket” offer.

That PDF we bought for $11 and never read.

The mini course we enrolled in for $27 and never watched.

She then explains why she chose the opposite strategy, contrasting what she calls the Volume Game with the Depth Game: transformation over transaction.

She speaks from experience. I’ve known Andi for a long time, since she first arrived on Substack. I watched her transformation, taking a break from the platform, coming back fresh, and becoming a bestseller.

For some reason, her post made me think of a song made famous by Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross: Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart).

I’m pretty sure Andi’s success began with that pause. She stopped. She looked. She listened to her inner voice.

Message in a painting.

Last August, I wrote about a book I return to often: A Month in Siena, a travel memoir by Hisham Matar. It’s about the time he spent in Siena immersing himself in the works of the Sienese School of Painting, a fascination that began when he was nineteen, exiled in London, at a time when his father, an opponent of the Libyan government, had disappeared.

Matar began visiting the National Gallery at lunchtime, spending an entire hour in front of a single painting.

Matar describes the paintings with such precision that reading the book becomes a full sensory experience. You feel like you’re standing there with him, watching the paintings.

The chapters I return to most are the ones describing his visits to the Sala dei Nove, the Hall of the Nine, inside the Palazzo Pubblico. This was the room where Siena’s government met in the 14th century, and the walls are covered by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s extraordinary fresco cycle: The Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government.

With Matar as a guide, I learned to look at these paintings carefully. Every time I revisit them, I’m reminded how clear the message is. Lorenzetti knew exactly what he wanted to tell us.

The Allegory of Good Government occupies the central wall and shows the relationship between virtues and power.

At the top are Wisdom, Faith, Charity and Hope.

Below them is the figure of the Common Good, an old man with a white beard, seated like a ruler.

Around him are the virtues that sustain power: Justice, Peace, Fortitude and Prudence on one side. Magnanimity, Temperance and Justice again on the other.

Justice appears twice.

Justice balances power.

On the left side of the painting, Justice holds a set of scales. In one pan an angel rewards virtue. In the other, another angel punishes wrongdoing.

The message is simple.

Justice creates balance.

Balance creates harmony.

And harmony keeps the community together.

Without Justice, the system breaks.

Power and Justice

I’ve been writing a lot about power lately. I wanted to align this publication more clearly with my actual work: helping women understand how power operates inside the systems they live and work in.

Last week someone asked me a question that made me think about this.

“What is the most common ‘aha moment’ your clients have when they begin to understand power differently?”

My answer was simple.

“It usually happens when women realize that the dynamic of power is very simple: whoever controls the money controls the system. And this is true in politics, corporations, and families.”

People tend to associate power with governments or large institutions. They rarely associate it with family structures or personal relationships.

But the same dynamic exists there too.

For many women, realizing this is a moment of real clarity.

I still stand by that answer.

But rereading Matar today reminded me that I had overlooked something important.

Money creates power.

But Justice defines its limits.

Lorenzetti understood this seven hundred years ago.

Power without Justice becomes dangerous very quickly.

Which is why women do not only need financial independence.

They also need a seat at the table where Justice is decided.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood that perfectly.

AI and Ethics.

One of the privileges of being a bioethicist is that I have spent years studying how societies react to technological change.

The pattern repeats itself across history.

Transformation is disruptive.

Adaptation takes time.

But the challenge we face today is different in one crucial way.

Change is now happening faster than human beings can adapt to it.

It does not matter how AI literate you are today. Tomorrow the system will move ahead again.

And this is exactly where Justice reappears.

Justice is one of the foundational principles of bioethics. It is the balancing force that keeps power and progress accountable.

If we want AI to serve humanity rather than dominate it, Justice must be part of the conversation.

That means transparency.

It means equal access.

It means asking who benefits and who is left behind.

Stop, look, listen and think.

Andi stopped, listened to herself, and changed her strategy.

Matar stopped in front of a painting and found meaning in the middle of loss.

I stopped, reread a book, and remembered something essential.

Women do not only need money to be free.

They also need Justice.

And now, as we rush into a future moving faster than we can follow, perhaps it is more important than ever to pause.

To stop.

To look carefully.

To listen.

And to think clearly about the kind of world we want to build.

Lorenzetti painted his values seven hundred years ago.

And they are still there, on the walls of Siena.

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“Thinking is my fighting.”
Virginia Woolf, diary entry, May 15, 1940

Every year on International Women’s Day I return to her words.

Virginia Woolf was born in London on 25 January 1882, the seventh child of a prominent and intellectually rich family. She grew up in South Kensington surrounded by books and ideas. Her father, the historian Leslie Stephen, owned an enormous library that shaped her intellectual life.

But there was a limit.

Her brothers were sent to Cambridge. She was not.

Like many women of her time, Woolf’s education was informal, private, and improvised. She learned by reading. What she lacked in institutional access she replaced with intellectual ferocity.

After her father’s death, the family moved to Bloomsbury, and something remarkable happened, Virginia Stephen became Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury was not simply a neighborhood. It was an experiment. Artists, economists, writers, and philosophers gathered there to question the ideas of their time.

Among them were Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf, the publisher and journalist who would become Virginia’s husband.

Together they formed the Bloomsbury Group, famous for their intellectual freedom, unconventional relationships, and refusal to accept the rules.

In 1917 Virginia and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press. A few years later they would publish the first English translations of Sigmund Freud.

Founding her own publishing house changed everything for her.

For the first time she had complete creative control.

She experimented with narrative form, particularly the Stream of Consciousness technique that would define novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Instead of telling stories through traditional plot, Woolf entered the mind itself.

Her writing allowed readers to follow a character’s thoughts as they unfold. Fragmented, associative, emotional, nonlinear.

It was revolutionary.

But while her novels transformed literature, her essays transformed something else.

They transformed how we understand women’s independence.

In October 1928 Woolf delivered two lectures at Newnham College and Girton College, the women’s colleges of Cambridge University. These lectures became the famous essay A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929.

The topic she was asked to address was simple: Women and fiction.

Her answer was anything but simple.

In the essay she imagines that William Shakespeare had a sister with equal genius. What would have happened to her?

The answer is brutal.

She would not have been educated.

She would not have been taken seriously.

She would not have been allowed to write.

And most likely, she would have gone unnoticed.

With that fictional sister Woolf exposed something obvious yet rarely admitted. Talent is meaningless without access.

Access to education.

Access to time.

Access to money.

In the essay she describes walking through the university campus and being stopped from entering the library.

A woman, she is told, cannot enter without a letter of introduction, written by a man.

Then she writes that famous line:

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

It sounds triumphant. But Woolf knew something deeper. The freedom of the mind is powerful, but it is not enough.

A woman also needs money.

She continued the conversation in two other essays. Professions for Women and Three Guineas.

Three Guineas, published in 1938, is perhaps Woolf’s most political work. It is structured as a response to a question about how society might prevent future wars.

Her answer does not focus on military strategy or diplomacy. Instead, she examines the social structures that make violence possible in the first place.

The same institutions that historically excluded women from education, professions, and political power are also the institutions that produce authoritarian thinking.

Universities, professions, governments, and the military were almost entirely controlled by men. The values cultivated inside those institutions shaped how power was exercised in the world.

Women, historically excluded from these structures, occupied a different position.

They were outsiders.

In Three Guineas she structures her argument around three symbolic donations.

The First Guinea. Education.

Women must have equal access to education. Without education they cannot develop independent judgment or participate fully in society.

The Second Guinea. The Professions.

Women must enter professions and public institutions. Economic activity gives them independence and influence.

The Third Guinea. The Society of Outsiders.

Here Woolf proposes something more ambitious than simply integrating women into existing structures. She imagines women forming their own intellectual and moral community, one that resists reproducing the same hierarchies and values that produced conflict.

Financial independence becomes central to this idea.

Woolf understood something that still feels uncomfortable to say directly.

Whoever controls the money controls the system.

And for centuries, women did not control money.

Even women from privileged families lived within financial dependency. Fathers controlled wealth. Husbands controlled income. Institutions controlled opportunity.

Her argument was clear.

When a woman has money of her own, the structure of power changes.

No husband can control her choices by controlling her income.

No institution can silence her through financial pressure.

Money becomes autonomy.

And autonomy becomes freedom.

This perspective becomes even clearer in her essay Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid, written during the Blitz.

Woolf reflects on a troubling reality.

The conflict above her is being fought by men and decided by men. The people commanding the forces and directing political decisions are male.

Women, at that time, were largely excluded from the positions where those decisions were made.

She observed that women had almost no voice in political power. There were no women in the Cabinet and few in positions where ideas could shape policy or determine the course of nations.

But Woolf did not glorify the war or call for women to join it in the same way.

Instead, she asks a deeper question.

If women have been excluded from the structures that produce war, what kind of influence could they exercise outside those structures?

Her answer is: intellectual resistance.

She argues that women can challenge the ideas that sustain authoritarianism, nationalism, and blind obedience. They can question the assumptions that make violence appear inevitable.

“Thinking is my fighting,” she wrote in her diary during this same period.

For Woolf, thinking was not passive. It was a form of intervention.

Ideas shape institutions. Institutions shape decisions. Decisions shape the world.

If the ideas change, the system can change.

That is why she believed intellectual independence mattered so deeply.

And intellectual independence is inseparable from economic independence.

A woman who depends financially on the very system she wishes to question has limited freedom to do so.

A woman who controls her own resources has a different kind of power.

Nearly a century later, Woolf’s argument is more relevant than ever.

Women have gained rights and access that would have been unimaginable in her time. Yet the distribution of power remains uneven.

Libraries close due to lack of public funding, once again limiting access to literature and education for those who need it most. Censorship returns. In many ways, we are moving backwards.

Woolf would recognize this pattern immediately.

She warned that progress is not permanent.

It must be defended.

Not only through protest or legislation, but through something more strategic.

Economic independence.

This is where her thinking intersects with the lives of many women today.

Especially women who spent decades inside systems that promised fairness. Systems like marriage, corporations, and institutions. Only to discover that the rules were never applied equally.

At some point the realization arrives.

Waiting to be recognized does not work.

Waiting to be chosen does not work.

Waiting for the system to become fair does not work.

Virginia Woolf understood this nearly a century ago.

Her response was not despair. It was strategy.

Education.

Professional independence.

Financial autonomy.

And the courage to remain intellectually independent even when the dominant system resists it.

Perhaps that is why some people are still afraid of Virginia Woolf.

She articulated something that cannot easily be undone.

When a woman controls her own mind and her own money, she becomes impossible to silence.

And once that idea exists, no gate, no lock, and no bolt can contain it.

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“Make it simple, but significant.”

When Don Draper said those words in Mad Men, his life was anything but simple. He had just accepted credit for work that wasn’t his. He was drinking too much, sleeping too little, and building a life that looked powerful from the outside but empty from within.

And yet the line stayed with me.

Years ago, I watched Mad Men for the first time. It was January. I was meant to be celebrating my fiftieth birthday at The Savoy in London with my daughter. Instead, I was alone in my Buenos Aires apartment. Four days before my birthday, I was fired.

I did not see it coming.

That month, Mad Men became my new breakfast routine and my education in strategy.

And strategy is everything.

Because when the system fails you, in marriage, in career, in institutions you were loyal to, emotion is natural. But emotion is useless, you need clarity.

Don Draper understood that. He knew that if you want to move forward, you need to be in control. He taught me how to get mine back.

Act Without Guarantees

In “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” and later in “Blowing Smoke,” Don finds himself trapped in bad situations. Other people are deciding his future, but he does not wait for rescue. He moves.

There is a moment in every woman’s life, especially after 45, when waiting becomes dangerous. You realise loyalty will not be rewarded. You realise competence does not protect you.

The temptation is to do nothing and to hope the mistake will be corrected.

It rarely is.

When I was dismissed, I spent weeks in disbelief. Then something changed. I understood that if I wanted to control my narrative, I would need to move before certainty appeared.

Acting without guarantees is terrifying. But inaction is more expensive.

The Power of the Unexpected Reaction

In “Field Trip,” Don is offered the chance to return to his firm under humiliating conditions. The partners expect him to refuse. He accepts.

That “yes” was not submission. It was positioning.

Like Don, I was offered my job back under quasi-humiliating conditions. I accepted. A year and a half later, I resigned on my terms.

In any professional history, the difference between being fired and resigning is enormous. I needed continuity. I needed time.

I left without looking back.

Simple but significant.

Grace Is Leverage

When you lose, your character is visible.

In “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” Don experiences betrayal on multiple fronts. His first reaction is anger. His final reaction is composure.

During the year and a half I remained at the Senate under precarious conditions, I continued to give my best. Not because the institution deserved it. Because I did.

Your reputation is portable capital. When women sabotage their own professionalism out of justified resentment, they damage their future positioning.

Grace is more powerful than revenge.

Today, former colleagues still show me respect. That matters. Networks are built in triumph, but they need to be preserved in adversity.

Change the Conversation

“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” This is probably one of Don’s most famous lines.

After the dismissal, my internal dialogue could have been: I was rejected. I was replaced. I was diminished.

Instead, I reframed it: The system revealed itself. I am no longer blind.

This is where strategic thinking begins.

Once you stop negotiating with broken systems, you begin designing alternatives.

Know Your Value

One of my favourite scenes in the final season shows Don sitting in a lunchroom after his firm is absorbed by a big corporation. Identical men. Identical boxed lunches. Identical laughter.

He realises he has become just one among others.

Without drama, he stands up and leaves.

That gesture contains more authority than any speech.

If you know your value, you do not beg for space.

And sometimes, you need to walk away.

Strategy is everything.

If you are at that crossroads, after betrayal, burnout, or institutional disappointment, pause before reacting.

Ask yourself:

What outcome do I want to design?
What positioning will protect my autonomy?
What temporary discomfort might secure long-term freedom?

Simplicity is not about doing less. It is about removing what is irrelevant.

Strategy is everything.

And, as Don Draper taught me, it only moves in one direction.

Forward.

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It does not rush to be understood. It moves first and lets clarity follow.

There is a pressure many women carry, the need to explain their decisions. Not because they are unsure, but because they have learned that silence is often interpreted as weakness. So they narrate. They soften. They justify.

They explain why they are leaving the job.
Why they are setting the boundary.
Why they are no longer available in the same way.

On the surface, it looks like communication. In reality, it is often self protection.

We are told that explanation equals transparency. That good leadership means over clarifying, and trying to avoid every possible misunderstanding. But more often than we admit, explanation becomes a strategy to manage other people’s reactions.

It is not a communication problem.
It is a positioning one.

When you have spent years being evaluated at work, at home, in everyday power dynamics, you learn that approval often comes after explanation. Decisions are not assumed to make sense. They are examined. Tested. Questioned.

And so you get ahead of the questioning.

You offer context before it is requested. You add footnotes to your boundaries. You translate your certainty into something easier for others to accept.

But authority does not do this.

Authority assumes coherence.

It trusts that the decision came from clear internal reasoning, even if others cannot immediately see it. It does not rush to close the gap between action and approval.

The most composed people in the room are rarely the most talkative. They speak only when necessary. They allow their decisions to stand without a running commentary.

This is not arrogance. It is confidence.

Many women cross these lines without realizing it.

A woman declines an invitation and adds a paragraph of justification.
A leader changes direction and quickly adds extra reassurance so no one feels unsettled.
A creative starts working in a new way and feels the need to explain why she has changed.

The explanation is rarely about clarity. It is about managing discomfort, theirs and everyone else’s.

But here is the truth.

Clarity does not come from explanation.
It comes from consistency.

When your actions align over time, explanation becomes unnecessary. When your standards are stable, people adjust. When your reasoning is clear to you, you no longer feel the urge to translate it for everyone else.

This is where power begins to feel different.

Not louder.
Not sharper.
Just cleaner.

You start answering questions directly instead of defensively. You allow silence to exist after a decision.

And yes, at first, it feels uncomfortable.

If you are used to explaining every move, silence can feel abrupt. You might worry that people will misunderstand you.

Sometimes they will.

But misunderstanding is not the same as misalignment.

We often over explain because we fear being perceived as cold. Especially in midlife, when many women are reassessing their identities, there is an added layer of tension. You are no longer the version of yourself who said yes to everything. You are refining. Editing.

That evolution unsettles people.

And when others feel unsettled, you may feel the urge to calm them with more context.

This is where you pause.

Ask yourself, am I explaining to clarify, or am I explaining to be approved?

That question alone can change the energy of a conversation.

There is nothing wrong with clarity. But when explanation becomes automatic, it can dilute your authority.

You do not owe a running commentary on your evolution.

You do not need to justify restraint.

You do not need to narrate certainty.

Power, especially the kind that emerges in midlife, is less about dominance and more about coherence.

Over time, something begins to change.

People stop expecting the footnotes.

The room recalibrates.

And perhaps more importantly, you recalibrate too.

You feel the difference.. Less urgency. Fewer rehearsed explanations. More space between the decision and the defence.

That space is where authority lives.

It moves first and lets clarity follow.

Power does not explain itself.

It trusts that coherence, lived consistently, will speak.

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We call it objectivity.
We call it merit.
We call it the system.

But when we look closely, really closely, we begin to see something else.

Systems are not neutral.

Bioethics taught me that.

Not in theory. Not only in books. But in the real space where medicine, law, and lived experience meet. Where decisions are described as rational and universal, yet women’s bodies, women’s voices, and women’s pain are repeatedly misunderstood or dismissed.

Once you see that pattern, you cannot ignore it.

Bioethics is often described as the study of moral principles in medicine and science. It sounds clinical. Academic. Distant.

It is not.

Bioethics asks an uncomfortable question:

Who decides what counts as valuable?

And when we apply a gender perspective to that question, everything changes.

Because now we are not only analysing ethical dilemmas. We are examining power.

We begin asking:

Who designs the protocols?
Whose data becomes the standard?
Whose risk is accepted?
Whose suffering is normal?
Who is believed?

When medical research has historically used male bodies as the norm, women’s symptoms become atypical. When pain studies reflect male experiences, women are called emotional. When reproductive health becomes political, autonomy becomes conditional.

This is not random. It is built into the structure.

And this is where bioethics stops being abstract and becomes strategic.

Because what we are really discussing is design.

The Illusion of Neutral Systems

For decades many women have believed that systems reward competence.

Let’s talk about Claire.

Claire is a hypothetical woman. She is 50. She has worked hard for decades. She has built expertise. She kept her head down and believed that if she was excellent, recognition would come.

It did not.

Claire represents many women in midlife, accomplished, capable, but still unseen.

We are told that systems are fair. That merit speaks for itself.

But what if the structure itself was never designed to recognise certain kinds of value?

In medicine, the standard body has historically been male.
In economics, the default worker has often been someone without heavy caregiving responsibilities.
In law, the reasonable person has reflected dominant social norms.

Neutrality often hides long standing bias.

And this is where the conversation moves from healthcare to brand strategy.

Because when you build a business as a solopreneur, especially as a woman in midlife, you are entering systems that were not originally built with you in mind.

Algorithms reward visibility and speed.
Corporate systems reward conformity.

If you build depth, integrity, and thought leadership, you may still remain invisible.

Not because you lack value.

But because the structure does not automatically turn value into visibility.

This is why I speak about strategic authority.

Expression without positioning is fragile.

Bioethics shows us that if we do not question systems, we repeat them.

Brand building is no different.

Gender Perspective Is a Tool for Clarity

The phrase gender perspective can make people uncomfortable.

It is not an ideology.

It is a way of analysing impact.

A gender perspective asks: How does this decision affect people differently based on gender realities?

In healthcare, this changes diagnosis.
In research, it changes design.
In policy, it changes outcomes.

In business, it changes strategy.

Women’s economic realities are different.

Career breaks. Care responsibilities. Divorce after decades of invisible work. Starting again at 50. Rebuilding income from the beginning.

When I speak about financial freedom as independence, I do not mean ambition for its own sake.

I mean safety.

Bioethics teaches that autonomy is empty if real options are not available.

You cannot speak about choice without conditions that make that choice possible.

You cannot speak about entrepreneurship without economic understanding and strategy.

This is why ethics and brand strategy belong together.

Ethics without power is fragile.
Power without ethics is dangerous.

The women I write for do not want domination. They want alignment. Stability. Agency.

They want their expertise to translate into something real.

A gender lens helps us see where value is lost.

Once we see it, we can redesign.

AI, Ethics, and Bias

Now we are entering a new layer.

AI is being integrated into healthcare, hiring, marketing, and writing.

Here is the truth: AI reflects the data it is trained on.

If past medical research underrepresented women, AI systems can repeat that pattern. If corporate data reflects decades of bias, AI tools can continue it.

Technology is not neutral.

It learns from history.

As a bioethicist, I do not see AI as something to fear. I see it as something powerful.

AI increases what already exists.

If we use it without awareness, it increases bias.
If we use it thoughtfully, it increases leverage.

Many creative women feel ashamed of using AI.

They worry it is dishonest. That it weakens their voice. That it does not align with their values.

But here is a different way to see it:

Using AI ethically is not replacing your mind. It is expanding your capacity.

The question is not: Should I use AI?

The question is: How do I use AI without losing my authorship or my integrity?

Bioethics offers simple principles:

Transparency
Accountability
Harm reduction
Justice

If you use AI to clarify your thinking but remain the author, ethical.
If you remain responsible for your ideas, ethical.
If you use it to increase access rather than exploit, ethical.

Ethics is not about avoiding tools. It is about using them with intention.

And for women building authority, structure matters.

Reinvention Requires Structure

Midlife reinvention is often romanticised.

Start again. Follow your passion. Launch something new.

But reinvention without financial structure is risk.

Bioethics reminds us that ideals must be grounded in what is realistic.

If you are rebuilding your life after betrayal, redundancy, or invisibility, you do not need excitement.

You need design.

You need clarity about:

Where your expertise sits in the market
How authority is communicated
How visibility becomes income
How technology reduces pressure
How ethics differentiates you

Creativity alone is not enough.

Clarity is.

Elegance is not excess. It is precision.

And precision is strategic.

The women I work with are not starting from zero.

They have decades of knowledge and experience.

What they lack is not capability.

It is translation.

Translation of expertise into visibility.
Translation of visibility into income.
Translation of ethics into advantage.

This is what a gender aware, ethically grounded brand strategy does.

It refuses invisibility.

It studies systems.

It builds alternatives.

The Change

There is a moment in every ethical awakening where discomfort becomes clarity.

You realise the system is flawed.
You realise neutrality is constructed.
You realise merit alone is not enough.

And then a decision appears.

Do you continue hoping to be rewarded by a structure that was never designed for you?

Or do you design your own?

This is not rebellion for noise.

It is independence.

Financial freedom is not selfishness.

It is protection.

It is the ability to make decisions without fear.
To leave when necessary.
To choose clients.
To refuse disrespect.
To build slowly and intentionally.

Bioethics gave me language for power.

It taught me that every framework reflects values.

So the question is not whether you will operate inside systems.

The question is whether you will understand them well enough to position yourself wisely inside or beyond them.

Because once you see the structure, you stop asking: Why am I not enough?

And you start asking: What does this system reward?

That question changes everything.

Calmly.

And, strongly.

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That detail matters.

Because that book was not born from peace or creative alignment.

It came from the precise moment a woman decided she would no longer absorb disrespect as the cost of participation.

That is where reinvention actually starts.

Not with reinvention theatre.
Not with a brand refresh.
Not with confidence workshops.

With a clean recognition:

This arrangement no longer deserves my competence.

Most women can locate the moment exactly.

The meeting where her ideas were repeated by someone else and suddenly taken seriously.

The pitch she designed and someone else delivered.

The role she was clearly qualified for but kept being postponed.

The creative labour she kept contributing because it was framed as the smart thing to do.

The relationship, professional or personal, where she realised she was carrying the emotional and structural responsibility for everyone else.

Not explosive.
Not dramatic.

Just cumulative.

Until everything becomes clear and the thought becomes unavoidable:

I cannot unknow this.

When I wrote my Cinderella story, I was not interested in fairy tales.

I was naming a pattern.

Women trained to survive systems that quietly benefit from their cooperation.

Waiting in offices, boardrooms, agencies, institutions, marriages, families.

Women who believed:

If I do this better, they will see me.

Until the belief matures into something more precise:

They see me. They simply have no reason to change.

That shift is structural.

Once it happens, there is no going back.

The real beginning of independence.

Here is the part that rarely gets articulated.

Most women do not build businesses because they are chasing freedom.

They build them because they are finished carrying other people’s comfort.

Finished being the invisible architect.
Finished being the emotional regulator.
Finished making everything work while someone else receives the credit and the compensation.

Entrepreneurship, for many women, is not aspirational.

It is corrective.

It is the logical response to recognising that the system is functioning exactly as designed, just not in your favour.

I did not become an advocate for women by chance.

I became one because I recognised the pattern in myself.

Highly capable.
Overqualified.
Strategically restrained.

I was not lacking ambition.

I was directing it in the wrong place.

And so were the women who found me.

Not beginners.
Not fantasists.

Women who had already proven they could build, lead, execute, and deliver.

They simply had not yet turned that competence toward something that truly belonged to them.

Rage is an underrated form of intelligence

We have been taught to distrust anger.
To dilute it.
To soften it into something acceptable.

But refined anger is not chaos.

It becomes:

clarity around what is no longer acceptable.

It is the shift from enduring to designing.
From hoping to structuring.
From being chosen to choosing.

What my work is actually about

I do not teach women to lean in harder.

I teach them how to leave environments that rely on their silence.

How to stop being the best kept secret.

How to convert invisible labour into visible authority.

How to build systems that do not require permission.

How to stop asking for seats and start drawing the plans.

My ideal client is not waiting to be rescued.

She is preparing her exit.

If this unsettles you, pay attention.

It means the old story is starting to loosen.

The one that said:

Be patient.
Be pleasant.
Be grateful.
Endure until rewarded.

The new story is quieter and far more disruptive:

See the pattern.
Move deliberately.
Reclaim leverage.
Own what you create.

No fairy godmothers.
No princes.

Just women who stop negotiating with structures that depend on their silence.

I believe burnout is often intelligence applied to the wrong structure.

I believe many women do not lose ambition in midlife.
They lose tolerance for inefficient systems.

I believe independence rarely begins with confidence and almost always begins with honesty.

I believe the most destabilising presence in any hierarchy is the woman who understands her value.

And I believe the rewrite begins exactly where Garmus began.

At a desk.
After a meeting.
When you can no longer pretend.

When you realise you could continue absorbing this.

Or you could open a document.

Draft the exit.
Design the company.
Build a life that no longer requires you to disappear inside it.

That is not fantasy.

That is how women change categories.

Welcome to the next chapter.

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For some strange reason, I can’t approach things as hobbies. When I’m interested in a topic, I need to learn everything about it, within a structured programme.

I think that when you study a topic within a curriculum, you don’t only gain knowledge. You also train your mind to think in new ways and from a new perspective.

When I studied to be a lawyer, I learned law, but also how to think like a lawyer. It was a five-year career with twenty-eight theoretical courses on different legal issues and two practical trainings. The content of each course was different, but they all shared a common thread: a lawyer’s perspective.

The same happened when I studied bioethics, gender policies, and literary translation. Different disciplines, each offering a new perspective.

I guess that’s why, when I approached branding and design, I followed the same pattern and enrolled in well-established trainings.

I began with branding, and then, when I wanted to design my own website, it was the turn of web design.

The web design course was very thorough, and one of the things the tutor kept stressing was the importance of having the copy before the design. She taught us that design always follows copy, and not the other way around.

As you can imagine, my next step was enrolling in the most complete copywriting course I could find. That was my aha moment, because I realised that, as a political and legislative advisor, I had been a copywriter for almost twenty-five years. The only difference was that I didn’t write to convert clients. I wrote to convert voters, always after designing a strategy.

That was my other realisation. During those years, I was also working as a strategist. And that took me straight to brand strategy.

As you can see, I was doing a lot of learning, but it didn’t stop there. I told you I’m not a hobby person.

I launched my business, The Copywriter Translator, with a website and copy designed by me. And in doing so, I became a solopreneur.

With the money I spent on trainings, platforms, and tools, I could easily have paid the best brand and web designer to do the job and have a professional website. But then I wouldn’t have all this knowledge, these new perspectives, and the thrill of setting up a new business.

My copywriting and translation work put me in contact with a lot of incredible founders, who inspired me to write my Cinderella story.

The first thing that became clear during our conversations was that they didn’t only need help with their copy. They also needed guidance with their brand and business setup. And that’s how I became a copywriter translator with a plus: brand strategy and design.

Another thing that started to come up during the last year was the confusion and concern around AI. Creative small business owners usually use AI, but feel some kind of guilt. They want to be authentic, but they are afraid that if their clients know they use AI, their reputation will be damaged.

That’s where my more than twenty years of work in bioethics and policy design came to the rescue. So my copywriting and translation work added another plus service: AI ethics guidance.

The truth is that brand strategy and AI ethics consultation overtook the translation business, and that’s why I’m in the middle of a rebranding. Another fascinating topic for a future post.

In the online world, it’s very common to hear that you don’t need to be an expert to give advice. You just need to be a few steps ahead. I disagree.

To have walked the walk is essential. But serious knowledge and preparation are the foundation of a framework you can use to act as a consultant. Otherwise, we are just talking about personal opinions.

While writing this post, I realized that on Substack, most of us are solopreneurs. The platform is set for us to be able to monetize our writing, and it gives us all the tools to do it, without the need of a team. But we still see ourselves as just writers.

I told you I’m rebranding my business, maybe it’s time to rebrand The Creative Advocate as well.

It’s only an idea for now, but that’s how all changes begin.

From idea to action, step by step.

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I have always been interested in what you could call “serious stuff”: law, bioethics, human rights, politics, literature. Sure, I have always loved fashion, but my engagement with it rarely went beyond reading Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. That was the extent of “superficiality” I allowed myself.

Two years ago, I took a course on writing non-fiction book proposals. One exercise involved brainstorming a catchy title, and I came up with The Creative Advocate. That moment was transformative. After a year of feeling lost, that name sparked something in me, and it put everything into motion.

When I quit my job and moved to Paris, I was determined to work in the field of literature. During the pandemic, I studied literary translation, attended courses and seminars, and even presented a paper at the 2022 Annual Virginia Woolf Conference. Yet something was missing. The Creative Advocate made me realise that what I truly needed was to channel my creative thinking.

So, I decided to launch The Creative Advocate, my Substack magazine.

That decision took me into the world of branding and design, as I needed to learn both in order to set up my publication. I devoured everything I could find on the subject, took courses, and replaced my usual literary podcasts with branding and design ones.

I became so fascinated with branding that I even took a luxury branding seminar at LVMH-Louis Vuitton!

The more I learned, the more immersed I became in this captivating world.

Especially after realising that we all have a personal brand, even if we do not know it.

It is in how people perceive us, the message we transmit through the way we dress, the words we use to communicate with others, and the decisions we make.

Because here is the thing about branding: it is so much more than colours and fonts.

When you are building your brand, there are so many questions you need to ask yourself. What is my vision? What are my values? Who do I want to help? Who can benefit from my advice?

It is profound work, an exercise in self-knowledge and self-awareness.

And it is also an incredibly powerful tool. When you work on your brand intentionally, you can shape the way people feel about you. This is not about manipulation. It is about balancing authenticity with effective communication.

The right style can change the course of your life and your career.

I remember my first steps as a lawyer, working in Family Law. Once, I was at court looking for a file when a legal clerk told me the judge wanted to talk to me. I was surprised, and a little alarmed, because it was not common for a judge to call a lawyer to their office.

She was an impressive woman. I had known her for years, as she had been my Family Law professor.

When I entered her office, she greeted me warmly and said, “I knew you were here because I smelled your perfume.” Then she added, “In fact, I have been meaning to ask you this for ages, ever since you were my student: what perfume do you wear?”

I was shocked. I had been called to a judge’s private chambers just because she wanted to ask about my perfume. After all those years, she still remembered me because she liked my perfume. But that was not all. Later that same day, she invited me to join her class as a junior professor. And that moment marked the beginning of my academic career.

I was 30 years old then, and I had been wearing the same perfume since I was 13.

To be honest, I was surprised when the judge called me to her office, but not when she asked about the perfume. Comments about my perfume have been a constant in my life. Without me knowing, that perfume had branded me.

I mentioned that I have always loved fashion magazines, and I remember the moment I first saw that perfume ad. I was completely mesmerised by it. The model looked so powerful, stylish, and elegant, all the things I wanted to be.

Looking back, I know they spent a fortune on that campaign, persuading ambitious girls like me to buy it. And I am so glad they did, because I got the message.

To this day, I still wear the same perfume because I want to feel powerful, stylish, and elegant. Those are the three words I chose to define myself when I was 13, without even realising it..

I wonder, what are yours? Do you know? If not, take a moment to choose three words that define you. You might be surprised by what comes to mind. And when you start living in alignment with those words, you’ll be amazed at the transformation it brings to your life.

Aristotle once said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

There are countless ways to achieve this timeless goal: through philosophy, psychoanalysis, or even by diving into thought-provoking books.

But I propose a new approach: Brand Yourself!

With this method, you won’t just gain wisdom, you’ll also have a lot of fun along the way.

I guarantee!

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“We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?” Carl Sagan, interview with Charlie Rose, May 27, 1996.

Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer and science communicator.

He popularized science with his TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

His ability to translate complex scientific language into concepts the general public could understand was as unique as his wisdom, and his capacity to foresee the challenges of our time.

The quote I shared above is part of a broader opinion he shared with Charlie Rose during his final interview:

"We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?... Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

Sagan was a visionary. He advocated for a cosmopolitan view of science, as a tool to enrich society and empower citizens.

And still, it always amazed me how clearly he identified, early on, the danger of leaving the regulation of science and technology in the hands of people unprepared to deal with these matters.

As a bioethicist, the core of my work and research is to assess the ethical implications of scientific and technological advances on people’s lives.
As a legislative advisor, I was responsible for drafting regulations on these very topics.

So I can tell you firsthand: Sagan was right.

The people making these decisions are often not prepared. I dare say many are ignorant of the basic principles of science, technology, and ethics.

What Sagan warned of in 1996 became reality in 2020: the mixture of ignorance and power turned a global pandemic into a global catastrophe.

People received contradictory guidance from authorities, not just governments, but also international organizations like the World Health Organization.

The approach to the pandemic copied strategies from the era of the Spanish Flu, ignoring the fact that in 2020, a virus could cross the globe in hours, not months. Borders were closed without considering that a virus respects neither borders nor nationalities.

When vaccines became available, some nations hoarded supplies, leaving entire continents with almost none, ignoring the virus’s capacity to travel and mutate. It’s no surprise the Omicron variant emerged in Africa.

And now, we face a new, uncertain frontier: the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence.

In a recent post, I discussed the implications of the broad use of AI in relation to copyright and the lack of regulation.

But there are other, far more dangerous applications of AI, for example, its use in mental health services.

There are apps today offering mental health “support.”

While mental health professionals are strictly regulated, these applications thrive in a legal void. In cases of malpractice, who would be held accountable?

In that final interview, Sagan said: “Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking.”
Today, those words resonate deeply.

We must begin to think critically, not just as scientists but, most importantly, as humans.

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At that time, there weren’t many Bioethics courses in Buenos Aires, and only a small group sat in that classroom. The professor asked us to introduce ourselves and share why we had decided to enroll.

The student sitting behind me said:
“I am a geneticist, and I want to know the limits.”

His answer was disturbing, but it made perfect sense.

Scientists always want to know more. They ask questions, and when they find answers, they move on to the next one. And they need to experiment. It’s not a choice, they need to prove their hypotheses. And, of course, they don’t always see the limit.

That issue is fundamental to Bioethics, a discipline born to define the limits of science and technology.

The history of science is not linear. For centuries, scientific and technological advances were seen as inherently positive, even virtuous. But that perspective was profoundly shaken in 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and when the world learned of the horrific medical experiments performed on prisoners in concentration camps.

At that moment, humanity realized that while science and technology can do good, they can also do immense harm.

Bioethics began addressing the philosophical, social, and legal dilemmas in medicine and the life sciences. To be considered ethical, medical practices must adhere to four fundamental principles: Autonomy, Beneficence and Non-maleficence, and Justice.

These principles were designed for medicine, but at their core, they are about power, vulnerability, and responsibility. Which is exactly why they matter far beyond laboratories.

And I believe we are entering a new era, where bioethics principles are the perfect tools to approach the ethical challenges of AI.

The new question is where the line between ethical and unethical AI practices should be drawn.

And, perhaps more importantly, who gets to draw that line.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked ChatGPT a question about herself, and I was surprised by the response. So I decided to give it a try and asked what AI had to say about me. Here is the response:

“Betina Cunado is an Argentine born lawyer, bioethicist, writer and consultant with a varied international career spanning law, legislative advising, ethics, and creative writing.

Key facts about her.

· She trained and worked as a lawyer and bioethicist, with academic and professional experience in ethics, gender policy and legislative consulting.

· She spent much of her career as a legislative advisor, drafting regulations and speeches.

· Betina runs Betina Cunado Consulting, offering services in copywriting, translation, especially English and Spanish, and AI ethics consultation.

· She writes and publishes essays on life, creativity, career transformation and ethics through her online newsletter The Creative Advocate on Substack under the name @thecreativeadvocate.

· Her personal journey has taken her from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to cities like London, Paris and Barcelona, where she lives and works, often reflecting on life transitions and cultural experiences in her writing.

In summary, Betina Cunado blends legal and ethical expertise with creative and cross cultural writing, positioning herself as a consultant and commentator at the intersection of ethics, language and life design.”

I was shocked. I didn’t anticipate that level of detail, because I never entered my personal data into ChatGPT, and most importantly, I never consented to share it.

The issue isn’t whether the information is accurate. The issue is that consent was completely absent.

So I asked again: Who is regulating this? Personal data is a serious issue.

And what about copyright?

In the last few weeks, I have received at least ten emails marketing workshops that promise to teach me how to use AI to write a blog, generate content for my website, and even create an ebook. I am pretty sure that much of the content we read every day is created by AI, and that’s okay. The problem is that the authors often don’t disclose this. If that content was generated using information that AI gathered from all of us, without our consent, then who is the true author. Again, what about copyright. And I don’t even want to get into the issues of authenticity and intellectual honesty.

As a bioethicist, I see that the line between ethical and unethical practices is blurry, and regulations are too vague. Big corporations are aware of this, and already have entire departments dealing with these issues.

So, as creatives, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, we really need to start thinking about drafting our own limits and best practices in the use of AI.

The sooner, the better. We are already behind.

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Which tool to choose.
How to fit it into daily work.
How to use it responsibly.

But what matters more is what happens much earlier.

The moment things stop being questioned.

By the time platforms are being compared, prompts refined, or disclosure debated, the most important decisions have often already been made. Not consciously. Not explicitly. But in practice.

A definition of success has taken shape.
A way of working has been chosen.

From a bioethics perspective, this early moment matters more than it seems. This is where commitments begin to form, long before they are named, as things start to feel obvious.

That can feel reassuring, especially when building something, creating under pressure, or trying to stay visible in a crowded space. But ethically, this moment carries risk. It closes off the questions that protect agency, responsibility, and integrity.

When AI is used to speed things up, stay consistent, or keep up, it is usually framed as a practical choice. And sometimes it is.

But at the same time, other decisions start to take shape.

What counts as your voice.
Whether the work still feels created.
Who is responsible for what is shared with the world.

These are not technical questions. They are ethical ones.

In bioethics, respect for autonomy is about agency. In creative life, that means staying the author of your choices, even when technology helps you move faster or think differently. Autonomy is not about rejecting AI. It is about noticing when things stop being questioned.

Ethical risk rarely comes from bad intentions.

It comes from treating certain compromises as unavoidable.
From mistaking speed for clarity.
From assuming that because something is common, it has already been justified.

This is where non maleficence enters the picture. Harm in creative work is rarely dramatic. It can look like subtle misalignment. Or the sense that your work no longer quite belongs to you.

By the time that discomfort appears, the choices behind it are often already in place.

So the question that keeps coming up is not:
“Is this the right AI tool”

It is:

“What is being committed to without noticing”

Because once an AI assisted way of working becomes routine, it does not just produce work.

It shapes how you see your own work.
How much explanation your audience is expected to receive.
What kind of relationship is being built with the people who read, buy, or follow your work.

Beneficence asks whether AI is helping create work that feels meaningful, aligned, and alive. Justice asks us to look beyond individual workflows and consider the wider ecosystem. Whose labour is invisible. Whose voices are amplified. And whose are muted.

These principles do not tell creatives what to do.

They do something more useful.

They slow things down at the moment before everything has been decided.

Bioethics reminds us that ethical practice does not begin with rules. It begins with attention. With staying curious while choices still feel flexible, and change is still possible.

With ethical AI, the real work happens before the work.

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