With this articulation of our perspective on the roles of generativity as active engagements in the world, I return to the four modes of generativity. I now identify them as four roles we play in our lives:
Role One: raising children or enacting a project [enhancing Personal Worth].
Role Two: mentoring and assisting other people inside an organization or community [enhancing Personal and Collective Worth].
Role Three: fostering and ensuring the maintenance of a tradition and/or preserving heritage [enhancing Collective Worth].
Role Four: working on behalf of a community or broader society, ensuring the welfare and prosperity of people living in this community or society [enhancing Collective Worth].
While I devote four of the subsequent essays in this series to these roles, I begin with a simple illustration: The first role of generativity is tangibly demonstrated in offering food to our family. We have engaged in a project (cooking a meal) that will benefit our children and other family members by providing nutrition, gratifying their senses, and creating a setting for family conversations. Meals often provide sanctuaries in which certain kinds of words can be stated and in which nonverbal communication is prominent. Many religious leaders use food and special meals to portray, honor, or invoke spiritual presence in a family setting. We increase Personal and Collective Worth when we prepare or participate in a commemorative feast (such as Thanksgiving or a Birthday party).
So, what happens when we want to convey to the next generation what we have learned about cooking? We prepare and distribute recipes. If we are particularly ambitious and are skilled and knowledgeable cooks, we write cookbooks or even host a cooking show on a cable channel. The goal is to spread and sustain our knowledge by teaching the next generation or our current generation. This is the second role of generativity. Collective Worth is enhanced.
Deep caring can move even further and deeper. We not only write our own cookbook; we honor other great cooks and seek to preserve their recipes, cookbooks, and even previously recorded cooking shows. This is the third role of generativity. It concerns heritage and tradition. Say the public library in our town has decided to throw away or sell at a greatly discounted price older books to make room for newer ones. Among them are some old cookbooks that seem out of date and are among the first books to be discarded. You find out about this decision and petition to keep the outdated books, noting that great recipes remain eternally valid and vital. It would be a shame to discard this enduring culinary wisdom and dishonor the wonderful women and men who carefully prepared these books. This is Generativity Three at its height. Our sense of Personal Worth increases as we serve as a guardian of enduring culinary wisdom. Collective Worth is sustained (perhaps even enhanced) when we help to preserve culinary heritage.
