Just in case you are uncertain, no, I am not under 25 years of age. And, no, I don’t have Snapchat installed on my phone. I barely know what the application does. If I understand it, the application is a social media program that lets users send each other photos which automatically delete after a few seconds. The concept is that there are many things in life that are ephemeral. They come, are a part of our lives for a while, and then are gone. We are formed by our reactions to a lot of different things. So a bright young Stanford dropout started a company around a way of using smart phones to have images from the lives of friends that come and go.

I’m not particularly interested in looking at the coffee my friends are drinking or even the decor of the coffee shops they visit. And I’m not the kind of person who looks at a picture and then deletes it. I think of photography in an entirely different way. Photographs are records to me. They hold the story of our people. I am in the process of digitizing thousands of slides taken by my mother and my father in law. The photographs they made tell part of the story of our family and ought to be preserved in a way that makes them accessible to future generations.

Snapchat, however, is founded on the concept that users don’t want to have things that are left behind. It automatically erases its own online presence without leaving a trace.

But those future generations don’t see photographs that way at all. They are like the images that flash across the television screen. Here one second, gone the next. They think in a visual manner, but don’t need to keep the visual clues once they have taken a glance.

Still, I am intrigued by the person Evan Spiegel. Like I said, he’s 23. He dropped kurt of Stanford. He started up a social media company and somehow earned the backing of some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. He seems poised to become one of the next dot com billionaires if he can figure out how to get people to pay for a social media experience.

What Intrigues me about him might be summed up in a tweet that he reportedly sent a day or so ago. I didn’t receive the tweet and he is the master of deleting social exchanges from the internet, so I don’t know for sure the content of the exchange. The report is that he simply said, “We’re enjoying being an independent company.”

That might not mean much, but, according to online reports, it was a response to an offer from Facebook to purchase his company for $3 billion. It isn’t every 23-year-old who would turn down a $3 billion offer.

On the other hand, it is, in a way a poetic response for Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg, at the ripe old age of 29 has already been recognized as Time’s Person of the Year, but I suppose that in the world of social media who is on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean much. Way back when he was only 22 years old, Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo to buy Facebook. It didn’t seem to derail his career. From all indications, he has been doing fine since making that decision. After all he somehow found the funds to make a $3 billion offer to Spiegel.

Of course all of this is completely in the realm of fantasy for someone like me. I have no idea what a billion is, let alone three billion. I’m pretty sure that no one is wanting to offer me a billion for any of my ideas. And I haven’t ever started a company, so I have no idea of how a company that has yet to make any profits at all can be worth billions. The world of billionaires and dot com startups seems to go on quite well without my input.

And, though I do use social media a bit, I have never really gotten into any of the ones that seem to be making billions. A guy who writes a thousand word essay every morning is not likely to be satisfied with Twitter’s 140 character limit. I have the Facebook application on my phone but mostly it seems to be people I know inviting me to play 21 questions, or jackpot casino slot machines, or dragon city. Apparently they didn’t get the hint when I declined to play farmville.

I guess the thing that is appealing about snapchat is that when I don’t respond to the selfies my friends send me it automatically deletes them.

I admit that I haven’t got a clue about what does or does not succeed on the Internet and I’m not likely to be the source of the next big billion dollar idea.

But I like the thought of a twenty-three-year-old who has the courage to turn down $3 billion. Not every person his age has that kind of confidence. Not every person his age understands that happiness is not a product of how much money you have. I don’t know what Spiegel was thinking. Maybe he is simply a good businessman and knows how to make more than $3 billion. Maybe he is arrogant and thinks that his idea is worth a whole lot more. But I like to think that he turned down $3 billion because he knows there are things that are more important than money.

When I was in my twenties, I chose a vocation that is not noted for big salaries and the accumulation of wealth. For me it was a great decision. I’ve had more joy and satisfaction from my life than people who have millions or billions of dollars. I can’t imagine giving up my vocation for any amount of money. After all, I don’t understand what a billion is. I’m sure I wouldn’t have a clue about how to manage such an amount.

I’m happy with the way things have turned out. I wouldn’t change places with Spiegel - not even for $3 billion.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.