For example, if I'm 10 years old, and invest 10 years into learning the guitar, it will pay off for the next 50 years. For a 60 year old, investing all those hours into the guitar offers comparatively little payback, even if the 60 yo learns at the same rate as the 10 yo.
One notable example would be moving to a country with a different language. School-age kids become native speakers in terms of years with little effort, while doing it in your 60s requires tremendous effort to get the most basic communication going.
My experience has been the opposite. Learning is also a skill, and at this point I am extremely accomplished at it.
> School-age kids become native speakers in terms of years with little effort
Often repeated, but doubtful. School-age children burn through incredible amounts of energy per body mass. There is almost nothing they do which is "little effort".
Probably originated because children (and adults) learn best through play, which is biologically how animals are designed to learn. But somehow "play" doesn't count as "effort"
Not that much. Brain is a rolling learning machine. When you are young (less than 15), your brain can grab and store a lot of information and instinctively understand complex concepts without even thinking about it. Those information will become the foundation of the rest of your life. Of course you will learn new things, but those things can be learns easily depending on those foundations. When you reach the second part of your life, new things get harder to learn. You can learn few specific things if you spend time on it (often this learn is comparison-based, you compare with what you already know instead on instinctively understanding the core concept, this is a big difference between very young and adult peoples), but not the hundreds on new things coming around.
I think the humble behavior is to actually consider new things are hard to understand and you can't learn everything, so you have to choose the new things to learn wisely.
I really doubt this. It is likely limited to, "why change when what I did got me here so far".
That and the belief that they'll die sooner than later anyway so why bother. Once you took away the idea that people will die and remain healthy in all ways - I think you'll see folks be much more open to adopting change at later stages in life. I see this with many people I know who are in their 60s. They're like, "Eh, it's too late. Gonna die sooner than later anyway." It's only the ones who think they're gonna live at least another 10 years (and realize how long that is) actually are open to changing.