The view that aging is all downhill may be one that you implicitly believe in. How many times have you made jokes about your age, made jokes about someone else’s age, or just looked in the mirror with despair at the toll time takes on your face? Yet, the media is full of images of people whose aging brings them joy rather than pain. There are 90-year-olds who can perform gymnastic feats, star in major motion pictures, and continue to publish best-selling novels. These examples might suggest that aging isn’t as bad as you may be led to think.

For the past 30 years or so, researchers in the field of aging have worked from the assumption that aging can be more than a downward drift toward loss and instead an upward trajectory toward self-realization. With time, those who study the concept of “successful aging” maintain that you can rise above the calendar’s relentless march. As an aspirational goal, this may seem great, but how realistic is it?

The original definition of successful aging postulated the three criteria of being in excellent physical health, mostly free of cognitive or bodily limitations, and vitally engaged in the world around you. Subsequent attempts to capture this ideal quality hammered away at the notion of “perfection,” given that most people do have some type of limitation and even chronic health conditions as they get older.

The issue becomes one not of an ideal state of body and mind, but one that maximizes people’s ability to thrive, given the realities presented both by the aging process and the not-always-perfect world in which people age. This less-than-perfect world throws up all kinds of barriers, from........

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