Disappearing is the wrong choice when it will not improve your situation in the future.
Many people who plan to disappear base their decision on short-term results because disappearing appears to quickly address the problem.
However, that is shortsighted.
When people search how to disappear online or read the massive number of books out there, what they often get are tactics.
Statements claiming no one will ever find you.
Vanish off the grid.
Disappear like a ghost.
Those are buzzwords.
Before buying into them, ask yourself:
Is this real?
Who wrote it?
I spent many years as a skip tracer hunting people down, so I understand how people are actually located.
How to Disappear Is Not the Solution
How to disappear itself is not a solution.
It is an action that gets you from A to B.
It is a method and a plan to go, but it is not a way of life once you are gone.
The real challenge is life after.
Who will you be?
How will you earn money?
Will you meet a partner?
Can you build another life?
So many questions need to be answered before you understand your path.
Asking yourself the right questions can prevent you from jumping the gun on an exit and making your situation worse.
The Young Man Who Wanted to Run
Here are a two real disappearance consultations where the clients should never have disappeared because doing so would have made their lives worse.
In the past, I shared the story of a young man who broke the law, was caught, and was going to the big house for a year.
He wanted to disappear because he was afraid.
The problem was that he did not have a shot in hell of staying gone.
I explained that if he vanished and got caught, one year could turn into three.
Plus, he had no way of earning money.
He would probably have needed to commit crimes to survive, so those three years could have become five.
Luckily, he did what was right for himself, faced what he had to face, and in the long run, after his time, his life turned out better than he imagined.
Disappearing would have made his problem worse.
He Had Everything He Needed to Vanish
Another case involved a businessman whose life was in jeopardy. However, he had everything he needed to disappear.
He had money.
He had income from websites.
Everything looked good.
However, every time we spoke, he sounded drunk.
I addressed the issue, but he did not want to hear it.
His attitude was that he could handle it and that the drinking would not affect his privacy.
I disagreed.
My point was that if he was hanging around bars, he could meet the wrong people or somehow expose something about himself.
Eventually, he closed out the conversation and was gone.
A few months later, he met the wrong woman.
While they partied, she took photographs and posted them online.
Sure enough, she identified the location.
The predator located him.
Things turned bad.
You Cannot Disappear and Remain the Same Person
Disappearing is not just about being hard to find.
It is also about changing the things about yourself that could become problematic in the future.
I often say:
You cannot be Johnny Miami, move to Spain, and become Johnny Ibiza.
What is the point of going if you remain the same?
Criminals on the run face the same problem.
They split.
Then they need to commit crimes to survive.
That becomes their downfall.
Your behavior follows you.
That is why I believe human privacy matters as much as technology.
You can change the location.
You can reduce the digital trail.
You can separate information.
But if you continue living exactly as you did before, eventually something may connect the old life to the new one.
Think Before You Disappear
Before deciding to disappear, ask yourself:
Will disappearing actually improve my life?
Can I solve the problem another way?
Can I financially support myself?
Can I change the behavior that created problems in my old life?
Can I live differently once I am gone?
The act of disappearing may be the easy part.
Living successfully afterward is the challenge.
Privacy begins with understanding yourself, your habits, and the information you leave behind. I explore that further in Privacy Begins With You: Defunding Your Data.
Books About How to Disappear
My work finding people and later helping people become difficult to find led me to write several books about disappearing and privacy:
Each approaches disappearing from a different direction, but the underlying question remains the same:
Will disappearing actually make your future better?
Frank M. Ahearn
I began my career as a skip tracer and social engineer, locating people and extracting information.
Eventually, I reversed that work.
Today, I help people with blackmail threats, extreme privacy, disappearance planning, identity separation, and situations that are difficult to explain.
I am the author of How to Disappear and have spent more than four decades working with people, information, privacy, and human behavior.
If you are interested in a privacy consultation, start with my Disappear Privacy page.
Think about the future before you disappear from the present.