You can totally imagine Goethe doing the same thing, preserving each precious instant of angst for the posterity that would someday recognize his genius. Except Daniszewski doesn’t preserve them all; some she sends out with Snapchat, so they appear on friends’ phones for around six seconds before vanishing irretrievably. In an era when everyone has the tools to be an artist and everything is recorded and stored—potentially forever—this counts as provocation. Daniszewski is embracing the ephemeral.

For Daniszewski’s cohort, the roughly 4 million Americans born in 1993 (she herself was born in the second week of 1994), such contradictions must constantly be negotiated: public versus private, virtual versus real, active versus passive.