While the active leader may be discounted in some cultures, he is also the protagonists in some wonderfully touching novels and movies about the senior citizen who conducts his one last battle. Think of the final scene in Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot or the near final scene in Robin and Marion when Sean Connery, as Robin Hood, and Robert Shaw, as the Sheriff of Nottingham, engage in their final battle. Or, for that matter, think of Sean Connery playing the aging Indiana Jones.
Career Option Six—Escaping from It All: Not all the men and women have chosen to remain active during their senior years. They have moved past the role of Generativity Two and have in many instances also decided not to engage actively in the roles of either Generativity Three or Four. Instead, they have decided to leave it all behind and to truly “retire.” In some cases, Option Six isn’t really a choice: there are medical issues to address or a disability that leaves them unable to actively engage the world. In other instances, it is a matter of social-economic class: these men and women simply do not have enough money to think of anything other than surviving from day to day on a meager income.
For those who are comfortably situated in life, it might be a matter of priorities: “I would just like to golf” or “I am delighted to spend my day with friends playing bridge.” Or “I spend my time working in the garage on my old Buick”, or “I don’t know what happens to my day each day; it always seems to fill-up with something or other.”
Sadly, in some cases it is a matter of burnout that has resulted from a stressful life and career. The outcome is stagnation rather than generativity of any sort. It is not uncommon for such mature adults to “hide out” in a retirement community that is “siloed” from any contact with younger people or people who are different from them in terms of race, culture, or socio-economic status. While this should not be taken as a generalized statement about all who live in these communities, it is important to recognize that the isolation which tends to occur can have a profound effect on the openness to various generativity roles. In short, these men and women are now “free” from the responsibilities of job, parenting, and civic responsibility; they have often not taken the next step, which has to do with “freedom to do something.”
Generativity One: New Beginnings and Ends
Our life is often filled with twists and turns. We repeat previous stages and a current stage comes to an abrupt end. These stage shifts are often directly related to Generativity One. We repeat our caring activities by becoming a grandparent or by starting a new project. We experience a collapse in Generativity One gratification with the death of a child or collapse of a project. Each of these shifts impacts on our sense of Personal Worth.
Grand Parenting
Although we have known about its inherent joys for a long time, grandparenting apparently is “the new rage.” (For example, watch a movie such as The Princess Bride where grandpa played by Peter Faulk gets to read an enchanting story to his grandson.) We have known for many years about the new ways in which we get to relate to children as grandparents and about the “second chance” that some of us get to be loving and playful caregivers. I observed in an earlier book focusing on men and women in their 50s (Bergquist, Greenberg and Klaum, 1993) that many mid-lifers, especially men, find they do a better job and gain more gratification in their role as grandparent than in their role as parent.
