header image

HOME

This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Interested in What I Create?



Bibliography

Sunday, October 05, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | Generational Divides



Whenever I ask a much younger friend to take photos of me doing stuff, I get anxious when I get back from them an avalanche of said requested photos. I mean, thank you for the generous coverage, and from all possible angles—but I’m from a generation where we only got 12 or 24 or 36 shots per roll, and every shot was indeed judiciously considered.

There is a curious generational divide between photographers who grew up with manual cameras where we loaded finite rolls of film, and photographers with digital cameras with almost infinite takes. My boyfriend is amazed that when I take photos of things, I do only one to two shots, and I’m done.

But this is not just about photography, of course. I’m trying to make a point about life itself, and how it has evolved. We who grew up with rolls of film learned to live with limits, and so we carry those limits like invisible luggage even now: the careful budgeting of meals, the instinct to keep receipts, the guilt over leaving rice grains uneaten. Every decision bore consequence. Every shot mattered.

The younger ones, who live in a universe of “abundance”—unlimited data plans, streaming libraries, bottomless feeds—have their own instincts: swipe first, decide later; buy now, return tomorrow; photograph everything, delete nothing. I make this distinction that they are born of a world where there is always more, where mistakes vanish with a click, where permanence is not a value but an afterthought.

Sometimes I envy them. Imagine living without the ghost of scarcity. Imagine not hearing your mother’s voice in your head reminding you to turn off the lights, to reuse the plastic bag, to save the paper for notes. They live lighter, perhaps freer. But sometimes I also pity them, if that’s the proper word for it. Because in living with so much, perhaps they miss out on the savoring, the weight of meaning that comes only when things are few and finite.

Take music. My generation bought cassette tapes and then CDs, and played them until they warped from use. We memorized the track list, knew which song was third, which was seventh, which lyrics to skip when your mother entered the room. Music was our companion, a tactile object of devotion. Today, music is a stream. Songs arrive, songs vanish, playlists mutate like weather. The younger ones don’t hold music in their hands—they swim in it. They never have to rewind with a pencil. And they will never know the agony of a favorite tape eaten by the player, the ribbon torn like entrails.

Or take love. My generation wrote handwritten letters, long and awkward, with sentences that revealed too much. You kept them in shoeboxes under the bed, tied with ribbon, the handwriting trembling with sincerity. They were artifacts of feeling. Today, love lives in disappearing chats and emojis. Feelings are communicated in gifs, then forgotten in scrolls. Sometimes I think: what happens when you no longer have a letter to hold, a photograph to crease, a mixtape to rewind? What happens when memory itself becomes disposable?

But then again, who am I to judge? Perhaps the younger generation has merely adapted to the truth we’ve resisted: that everything is impermanent. They are not burdened by permanence because permanence is a lie. Perhaps the letter in the shoebox, the tape in the stereo, the photograph in the album were only illusions of forever. Maybe they are wiser for living in abundance, because they’ve learned early that nothing, really, can be held on to.

I straddle these worlds uneasily. I love Spotify, but I still keep my CDs. I use Google Docs [sparingly], but I still buy notebooks. I binge-watch, but I also linger on reruns like they’re relics. I like to think of myself as fluent in both languages: the language of scarcity and the language of excess. My boyfriend laughs when I count the shots I take, careful, deliberate. He floods his phone with images, careless, exuberant. Between us, there is sometimes tension—but more often there is balance.

Perhaps that is the secret to living with generational divides: not choosing sides, but learning dialects. Scarcity teaches us weight, abundance teaches us release. My parents taught me how to save and preserve; my younger friends teach me how to waste beautifully, how to throw things into the air and not mind if they’re lost. Both are needed. Both are ways of surviving.

Because in the end, whether you keep 36 shots or 3,600, the point is the same: you are trying to hold still the fleeting. You are trying to resist the blur of time. My generation grips hard, their generation lets go, but both are gestures against the inevitable.

And so I no longer sneer when I receive a hundred photos of myself from my younger friends—anxiety be damned. I scroll through them patiently, because somewhere in that excess lies a truth I might have missed with my careful two. Somewhere in the avalanche is an accident of beauty, a frame that catches me laughing in the middle of a word, or staring off into space unguarded. A photograph I could not have posed for, a memory I could not have planned.

Sometimes life rewards preparation, sometimes it rewards abandon. Sometimes you get by with 36, sometimes you need the flood of thousands. Generations may quarrel over the details, but really, we are all engaged in the same project: to make the fleeting matter. To take what little—or what plenty—we have, and pretend, for a heartbeat, that it can last. And in that, we are not so different at all.

Labels:


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich



GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS