The Curious Woman After 50: Why Your Best Learning Years Are Not Behind You

New research says the curiosity that matters most grows with age. Here is why midlife is exactly the right time to follow it.

I once seriously considered becoming an Egyptologist.

Graduate-level seriously. Like half the country, I became fascinated when the Treasures of Tutankhamun toured the States in the late 1970s. I never saw the exhibit in person, but I still have the National Geographic magazine that came out at the same time and several newspaper clippings my mother saved. The ancient world, the tombs, the mythology, all of it fascinated me. I did not switch majors because of my aversion to sand, that is the joke I tell, and I am sticking with it, but my interests veered toward international relations and history, and Egyptology became the thing I kept reading about on my own time instead.

It never stopped being that.

For several years I drove to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago on Saturday mornings from Milwaukee to take courses with people who loved the ancient world as much as I did. I visit every museum with an Egyptology collection I can find. If there is a special exhibit anywhere near a town I happen to be in, I am there. I read the historical fiction and the serious nonfiction and everything in between. I am fifty-nine years old and still learning about ancient Egypt, and I expect I will be at ninety.

That is just Egypt.

A curious mind, if you have one, does not stay in one place for long.

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What Else Is on the List

The Holocaust is something I have studied and read about for decades, ever since I was a college student and my professor showed us her number tattoo. That was the moment it stopped being history and became something I could not look away from. I have been to Dachau. I have stood in Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam. I have visited monuments and museums here and abroad dedicated to those who were lost, and Auschwitz is still on my list. That interest has never waned, and I do not expect it to.

Louis XIV and the world he built at Versailles, which I have been reading about for decades and still find new corners in. The history of France more broadly. I once found myself up late at night reading old microfiche of documents from the French Revolution online, not for any project, not for any reason except that I was curious. Venice and its courtesans and its politics. China’s Forbidden City, the concubines and harems, the elaborate interior world behind those walls.

Art history, which I have studied for years not because I can paint (I cannot) but because I find it miraculous that some people can. I stand in front of a Rembrandt and I do not understand how a human hand did that with pigment and oil. The Old Masters and the Impressionists are where my heart lives. Brutalist and modern art I will leave cheerfully to others.

Music too. Gregorian chant and early music, classical music and opera. I play the violin badly and still love it, which if you have read that post you already know. I follow my old professor John Mearsheimer on international relations and geopolitics because I believe understanding the world requires actually engaging with it. Bird watching from the window while I drink my chocolate counts too.

And every morning, after I have had my drinking chocolate and Patches has settled on the ottoman and the house is still quiet, I try to learn one new thing. A word or two. A fact. A piece of new information I did not know existed. Because the day I stop wanting to know things is a day I would rather not wake up to.

This is not a resume. It is just my daily life.

What the Research Turns Up

Here is something worth knowing, because it surprised me.

Most of us have been told that curiosity is a personality trait that belongs to the young. That it peaks somewhere in childhood, and that curiosity decreases steadily from there. Take that at face value and you would think middle age is where a curious mind goes to sit down and stop asking questions.

But that turns out to be only half the story.

An international team of psychologists, led by Mary Whatley, who began the work as a doctoral student at UCLA and now teaches as an assistant professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, designed a study that pulled apart what the psychology literature calls types of curiosity. Working with UCLA psychologist Alan Castel and colleagues Kou Murayama and Michiko Sakaki at the University of Tübingen and Kochi University of Technology, they gave a large sample of participants across the adult lifespan an online questionnaire measuring each person’s general level of curiosity, then tested responses to various forms of trivia, including some genuinely hard trivia, tracking interest ratings and that kind of momentary feeling of curiosity people experience when they encounter new information on specific topics.

What they found split cleanly into two stories.

Trait curiosity, the broad appetite for whatever comes along, does decline with age. That is what the prior research had always found, and it is real. If you measured only that, you would conclude that old age is the end of the curious mind.

But there is a different type of curiosity the prior research had missed.

State curiosity, the deep and specific kind, told a completely different story. That passionate thirst you feel when you encounter a subject that has its hooks in you, a curiosity about specific interests and specific topics that matter to you personally, does not fade. It dips in early adulthood when mortgages and children and careers crowd everything else out, and then it rises again after middle age. And keeps rising. The older adult participants in the study showed a fairly high level of overall curiosity when it came to subjects they cared about, even as their broader curiosity had softened.

Castel called this selectivity theory: the idea that as we get older, we do not want to stop learning. We are just more selective about what we want to learn. A doctoral student might be curious about everything. A woman of fifty-eight might care about fewer things, but she cares about them with her whole attention.

(You can read the UCLA newsroom summary for the accessible version, or go straight to the full study in PLOS One if you want to go deep.)

The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Humboldt Foundation, also pointed to something that matters even more for women our age: older people who maintained active curiosity and kept seeking out new information showed stronger cognitive resilience. Castel noted that people in the early stages of dementia often show a loss of interest in things they once loved, a muted level of curiosity that looks, from the outside, like simply slowing down. Staying curious may not just be good for your mental health. It may help protect against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of cognitive decline. It goes a long way toward keeping your mind in the kind of shape that matters.

We are not winding down. We are, if we choose to be, just getting started. Think of it less as a second act and more as the part where you finally get to choose the subject.

Why Midlife Is the Right Time

When I was in my twenties and thirties, curiosity was always fighting for space. Graduate school, career, marriage, family, the long years of tending to everyone else first. I was curious, but curiosity lived in the margins. Books I was too tired to open. Classes I kept meaning to take.

And then, honestly, it got worse before it got better.

The last several years have not always felt like my own. It started during Covid, which is ironic considering time was all we had. But that time evaporated in worry, about ourselves, about family who were far away, about a world that felt uncertain. In the middle of it we sold our house. The sale fell through. So did the purchase of the next one. Both in three months. Two years later we did it again, buying, selling, packing, moving. And then the remodeling started, one project after another, each one eating more time than the last. Add in aging parents and family obligations and work, and what was left went to the blog and reading for fun, which is not nothing but is also not the same as following a thread just because it fascinated me.

Then one night I started watching Story of Yanxi Palace on YouTube. Seventy-two episodes. I could not stop. And from that show I fell into reading about the Forbidden City, the concubines, the politics behind those walls, the elaborate interior world that I had always been vaguely curious about but had never actually sat down with. One thing opened the next thing, the way it always does when curiosity gets its hooks in you.

And just like that, I found my way back.

The margins are wider now. Not because life got simpler, it did not, but because I stopped waiting for a perfectly clear stretch of time that was never going to arrive.

Everything you have already lived makes you better at learning, not worse. A twenty-two-year-old can memorize new information. A woman of fifty-five can feel it land. She can connect it to a dozen other things she already knows that suddenly look different in its light. She can ask the more interesting question because she has lived long enough to know what the interesting question is. That is not old age slowing you down. That is experience doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

We bring more to the table than we ever have. And finally, if we are lucky, we have a little time to sit at it.

Giving Yourself Permission

I am not going to give you a list of assignments. You do not need them. But I will say this.

Follow what pulls at you, not what sounds like it should be good for you. The world is full of people who read the books they thought they should read. Read what keeps you up past your bedtime. If ancient Egypt has been calling for thirty years, it is calling for a reason. New experiences do not have to be extreme or exotic. Sometimes a new experience is picking up a book on a subject you know nothing about and letting it take you somewhere.

Visit the museum. The small ones, the unexpected ones, the ones with an exhibit on something you know almost nothing about. Go alone if you can. You will spend twenty minutes in front of one painting without apologizing to anyone, and you will want to.

Take the class even if you are not good at it. Especially then. I play the violin badly and it is one of the best things I do for my brain, and frankly for my soul. Not being good at something you love is not a reason to stop. It is part of the personal growth that keeps a curious mind sharp, and it is the kind of thing that reminds you what it felt like to be a beginner, which, if you are on the right track, you should be feeling regularly.

Read widely and across centuries. Historical fiction is often the best way into a period because it puts you in the room. Nonfiction fills in the architecture. The two together are how a curious mind stays alive.

And try to learn one new thing every day. Small and consistent. New information, even a little bit of it, compounds over years into something you cannot quite name but can absolutely feel. It does not have to be a grand project. It can be a word, a date, a name you did not know yesterday. The older people I admire most are the ones who never stopped doing this.

The Thing Underneath All of This

Curiosity is not really about accumulating new information. It is about staying in conversation with the world. It is the opposite of deciding you already know enough, of letting the days go by without paying attention to what is in them.

I am fifty-nine and I do not know nearly enough about the Venice of the doges, the music of the medieval courts, or what was happening politically in France in the decades before Louis XIV was old enough to take the throne himself. Some nights I sit in the Indigo Room with a stack of books and a candle lit and I think about how much there still is. And it does not feel overwhelming. It feels like there is so much more to look forward to.

I am looking forward to finding out.

What are you curious about right now? This is not a rhetorical question. Tell me in the comments. I would love to know what is pulling at you.

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