Why Would You Want It to Disappear

Even I feel too old for Snapchat, and I’ve made a certain peace with that. The whole premise—everything vanishes, nothing accumulates, the conversation exists only in the moment—runs against every instinct I have about why you’d bother communicating at all. The first time I encountered the disappearing message feature, my reaction wasn’t freedom. It was: but why wouldn’t you just keep it.

Someone ran the obvious experiment: hand the app to people in their seventies and eighties, film the results. The confusion is immediate and genuine. Messages that vanish? Why would you want that? What’s the point of saying something if it just evaporates? One man sets the phone down on the table, done with it, and starts talking about the Polaroid—how you’d hold the camera up, hear the click, and the photo would slide out into your hands. A physical object. Something you could keep.

There’s something clarifying about watching someone encounter a technology with no prior framework for it. No gradual adoption, no accumulated habit—just the thing itself, cold. And their instincts aren’t wrong. The ephemerality that feels liberating to a teenager, the freedom from record and consequence, reads to an older person as plain waste. All that communication, evaporating. Why.

The gap isn’t really about technical literacy. It’s about what you believe communication is for.