Does Privacy have an Expiration Date?

an essay in 250 words

Does privacy go sour? Does it get thrown out with the trash once someone takes their final breath and their heart stops beating? Or is it recycled into something more marketable?

Society is at the crossroads of privacy and of perpetually-public posting. Access to intimacy is the new normal.

Joan Didion has a “new book” for sale. Personal letters to her husband and transcripts from her private therapy sessions are now beautifully bound together to read by anyone with $32. In another year or so, her thoughts will likely be available at a discounted price in a paperback package.

It’s curious that when someone of societal-note dies, their journals are somehow magically “uncovered” and then subsequently published in hardcover, isn’t it?

This was the case for Kurt Cobain who scribbled, “If you read, you’ll judge” on the front of a red, Mead spiral-bound notebook. The posthumously-published pages were clamoured for by those who claimed to be his biggest fans, but would Cobain be a fan of his private thoughts being made public?

To steal intimacy isn’t fandom; it’s a form of assault. Just because someone is no longer physically in existence—perhaps especially because they aren’t—their privacy still is.

Before they died, both Didion and Cobain gave generously and with agency in a time when ink-bruised journal pages were quite literally kept under lock and key. Before it insidiously became a given to share carefully-curated collections of each day’s moments—with the biggest fear being that no one is looking at all.

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