After 55, what interests us can continue to change. Sometimes an experience, a conversation or an encounter is enough to reveal a desire we had never put into words.
We can know very well what we like.
The places where we feel comfortable, the people we spend time with, the interests we choose to pursue. With experience, we also become quicker at recognising what is not for us.
And yet, knowing ourselves better does not mean becoming entirely predictable.
An interest can emerge while we listen to someone talk about something unfamiliar. We can enter a place without particular expectations and discover that we would like to return. An activity we had never considered can suddenly become interesting when we see it through someone else’s experience.
We can live in the same home, do the same work, care about the same people and still realise that we do not want exactly the same things we wanted a few years ago.
Our Desires Can Change Without Our Lives Changing
When we talk about change in adulthood, we often connect it to recognisable life transitions.
A child leaving home. Retirement. A move. A separation. A new job.
These experiences matter for many people, but they are not universal milestones. Some people do not have children. Some continue working for many years. Some live with a partner, others live alone. Some go through major transitions, while others maintain an outwardly stable everyday life for a long time.
Personal change does not necessarily follow these calendars.
It can be much less visible.
An interest that once occupied a large part of our lives can become less important. Something we had always considered distant can begin to attract us. We may want to explore a subject, discover a different environment or make time for an activity we had previously only observed from the outside.
We do not need to interpret every new desire as evidence that something is missing.
Sometimes we simply want something we did not know well enough to want before.
Experience Can Come Before Desire
We are used to imagining our choices as a fairly linear sequence: we know what we want, look for the right opportunity and decide whether to take part.
But it does not always work that way.
Sometimes the experience comes first.
A conversation can make us want to read a book. A visit can awaken an interest in a period of history we had never explored. Someone we happen to meet can tell us about a place, an activity or a way of looking at an issue that had never been part of our horizon.
Before that moment, we did not feel that we were missing anything.
That possibility simply had not yet become meaningful to us.
This is what makes curiosity in adult life so interesting: it does not ask us to abandon what we know or to keep searching for novelty. It leaves part of our experience open to discovery.
Even after decades of choices, skills and habits, we have not necessarily encountered everything that might interest us.
Curiosity Does Not Mean Always Being on the Move
In 2025, a study published in PLOS ONE examined the relationship between curiosity and age in adulthood by distinguishing between two dimensions.
The first is trait curiosity: curiosity understood as a relatively stable disposition. The second is state curiosity: curiosity that arises in response to something specific we encounter and that makes us want to know more.
In the study’s main sample of 1,218 adults, age was negatively associated with trait curiosity and positively associated with state curiosity. The authors therefore describe the relationship between age and curiosity as more nuanced than a simple story of increase or decline.
This does not mean that we automatically become more curious as we grow older. Nor does it predict how any individual person will behave.
It does, however, offer a useful distinction for thinking about adult life: we do not have to be constantly seeking novelty for something new to capture our curiosity.
Curiosity can be very concrete.
It can begin with a subject we do not know. With the wish to understand something we already care about more deeply. With a willingness to listen to a view different from our own.
And it can be about people.
Taking an interest in others does not necessarily mean being extroverted or finding it easy to meet anyone. It can mean asking a question and genuinely wanting to hear the answer. It can mean noticing that someone else’s experience changes, even slightly, the way we see something.
Curiosity does not require a full diary, constant travel or an especially outgoing personality.
Above all, it requires that not everything has already been decided.
What Interests Us Is Not a Final List
After 55, we have enough experience behind us to know many things about ourselves.
We can choose more consciously where to invest our time, which interests to cultivate and which situations do not feel right for us.
But self-knowledge and curiosity are not opposites.
Knowing who we are does not mean already knowing everything we might one day enjoy.
Some of what we will want will also depend on what we have yet to encounter: the experiences we will have, the ideas we will come across and the people we will listen to.
Not every encounter will change something. Not every experience will become a passion. And we do not need to keep transforming ourselves to prove that we are still open to life.
We can simply leave some room for something that feels unfamiliar today to become interesting one day.
Perhaps some desires are not waiting to be fulfilled. They are still waiting to be discovered.
Source:
Whatley et al. (2025), Curiosity across the adult lifespan: Age-related differences in state and trait curiosity, PLOS ONE.
Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0320600
