For me at least, it&#x27;s nice to have a language feature which tells me &quot;BTW, the borrow checker is about to start caring about how long this memory is around.&quot; As opposed to the opposite, which is that everything you ever do will trigger the lifetime checks for passing arguments, and you would have to explicitly tell it to go away and that you want ownership to move.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m referring to the `&amp;` operator which creates a reference&#x2F;pointer to the memory it precedes.