The Vanishing

Look, I’m too old for Snapchat. Not age-wise, but in the I-don’t-care sense. Fifteen-year-olds with constant running commentary on their snack choices, drunk friends filming blurry garbage from parties that were already unbearable sober—I can do without all that. The whole thing’s too fast to even get a proper hard-on out of it, if we’re being honest, and that ruins it for half the people using it.

But I got curious what happens when you give Snapchat to someone actually old. Someone who still uses a real camera, who doesn’t really know what an iPhone is besides the glowing rectangle everyone stares at. You put the phone in their hands, show them how it works.

They don’t get it. Image appears, then disappears. Where did it go? Is it coming back?

You have to tell them: it’s gone. Deleted itself. That’s the whole thing.

Why would anyone want that?

That’s what all of them asked. Every single one. Why take a picture if you’re not going to save it? What’s the point?

For their generation, a photo was something real. You took it on film, developed it, got a print. It stayed. You could look at it years later, show someone, keep it in a drawer. It mattered because it lasted. The idea that you’d capture something and then immediately erase it seemed insane—almost disrespectful to the moment you just took it.

One older guy just handed the phone back and started reminiscing about instant cameras. Polaroids. The photo comes right out. Proof that something happened. You can hold it, pass it around, it sticks around. Not this vanishing act.

We’re all supposed to believe now that ephemeral is better. Modern, liberating, cool. Everything disposable. But photographs meant something once, specifically because they weren’t. They lasted long enough to actually become memories. Now you’ve got a few seconds before they dissolve into nothing.

I’m not sure which is worse.