I got a Ph.D. at age 66 (2018)
If doing a PhD will bring no career benefits, it gets harder to submit to all of the limitations on one’s life that come with going back to a degree program.I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.