this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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From a completely unscientific but 'experienced' perspective I think the problem is that life just gets in the way as you get older, and you prioritize your own life rather than trying to learn.
Whether neuroplasticity means you can learn things later or not, the opportunity to learn things later just isn't there without effort.
Having a job, kids, a mortgage and no social obligation to learn in a structured and organized way probably impacts you more than anything neurological.
I'd imagine it also has something to do with becoming less practiced at learning things.
It would be interesting to test this on career paths that basically require continuous learning.
Like I would be a perfect test subject because I plan to stay in the IT engineering space my whole career.
and, like, people just straight up stop trying. they hear that it's harder to learn as you age so they don't even try, and that of course confirms to everyone around them that it's true, and so everyone keeps giving up.
it drives me up the fucking wall and the spite i hold for this phenomenon is like 70% of why i have a healthy lifestyle. I fully intend to be doing acrobatics at 60 purely so i can make people feel bad for making moronic lifestyle choices like driving 2km to buy 5 liters of alcohol for the weekend
Yeah, get in what you want because in twenty years the greatest thing your brain will enjoy is not processing anything of consequence.
Could you learn cuneiform and gain a rich understanding of 18th Century Viennese intellectual culture, if you didn’t know anything about that before? Sure.
*burp* But then you’ll be like “ah, gotta bring in the trash cans and then I can sit.”
People who have tried to gain literacy later in life have had a lot more trouble learning to write than read. It seems that the fine motor skills to drive a pen are best learnt early