15 Steps To Completely Disappear from Society

There's a difference between putting your life on airplane mode and leaving your entire life behind in search of a new one. Some people simply can't settle for a cookie-cutter life; to them, it's either freedom or nothing. What if you could simply quit your current trajectory in life and start again, this time with experience? What if you want none of it and simply want to go away and live peacefully somewhere?

Well, this one's for you. The fantasy of doing just that—leaving your current life behind and starting fresh—is actually on the table, and we're going to walk you through the entire process legally. Here are 15 steps to completely disappear from society and start fresh.

Welcome to Alux! Now before we dive into these steps, we're just letting you know this is a realistic approach. You're not going commando or doing anything illegal here. You can achieve the exact result you're looking for through completely legal means with tools you have at your disposal if you actually want to do it. Here's how.

Step One: Figure out what you don't like about your current life and make a real decision about leaving it behind. You need to start off with a little bit of self-reflection. Take time to deeply understand your dissatisfaction with your current life. What makes you dislike it so much? Is it your job, relationships, people, or something else? Is it all bad, or could it be fixed? Before making a drastic decision, know that there might be less extreme solutions to your unhappiness, such as career changes, moving, or going to counseling. Small shifts could lead to completely new experiences without having to leave everything behind. You just want to make sure that your desire to disappear isn't some kind of temporary impulse, but a decision you've thought through. Because look, okay, it's not an easy thing to do, and more often than not, it is a permanent thing. So if you're serious about this, you can start your preparation phase.

Step Two: Start routinely ghosting and distancing from the people you interact with regularly. Gradual withdrawal. Begin to slowly reduce your presence in social settings and online to make your eventual disappearance less noticeable. Social ties are a big part of the equation. You want to be left alone once you go away, and if you do it too suddenly, the folks in your life will start looking for you and bugging you. Manage expectations. Adjust the expectations of those around you to get them used to your reduced availability. Stop saying yes to things and slowly remove yourself from all social circles. It helps if you get away for a couple of months and then come back, like a test run, to see how your social ties react. It's also a training mechanism for them to get accustomed to the idea of you being away for extended periods of time so they don't label you as missing once you do it for real.

Step Three: Start selling off most of your stuff slowly and build that seed fund. Look at all the junk you have in your current life. If you really want to start fresh, almost none of it can come with you. Instead of giving it away, convert it into cash or value that you can take with you. You want to do this slowly because if you do it all at once, it'll draw massive attention, something you want to avoid. Ideally, at this point, you should have a clear understanding of what kind of wealth you can go away with. This is your seed fund for your new away-from-here life.

Step Four: Pay off all your debt, withdraw your cash, and shut down your bank accounts. Since you're looking to make a clean break from your current life, you want a clean slate. Stop accruing new debts and pissing people off. The last thing you want are debt collectors looking for you and your past life, not allowing you to move on. Do it right, okay? Depending on your level of off-the-grid, you might want to remove all of your finances from institutions and shut them down. No worries, you're not moving deep into the jungle living that hunter-gatherer lifestyle. No, you'll open up new accounts for your new life someplace else.

Step Five: Remove your digital footprint and shut down your social media accounts. Your data—name, address, email, phone number, history, purchase behavior, education, and everything else you've done online—are saved and sold on the Internet by what are called Data Brokers. It's mostly strangers, advertisers, insurance brokers, and fast cash providers who purchase your data in order to sell you stuff. But beyond that, these brokers allow anyone to pay to get anyone else's personal info. You need to understand that when you hit upload, those files— that data— is no longer yours. Identity theft has gone up by 40% year-over-year because so much of your private data is available online through these brokers. Scams, harassment, or even people showing up to your house are real threats to you and your family.

Lucky for you, Incog, the sponsor of this episode, has made it incredibly easy to remove your data from all of those registers. And since they're friends of the channel, if you go to incog.com, you’ll get an exclusive deal of 60% off the annual plan in three easy steps. They'll act on your behalf and scrape your digital footprint used by data brokers. This minimizes the risk that someone will use your personal information to take out loans in your name, to impersonate you via AI, and gives you an overall clean slate moving forward. Go to incog.com today and don't miss out on our exclusive offer.

Step Six: Cancel subscriptions and leave your tech behind. Every active subscription you have is an active tracker associated with your position. The proper way to give yourself a real fresh start is to 1) cancel your subscriptions, and 2) drain all the digital devices associated with you and sell them, dispose of them, or just leave them behind. If you don't want to go to extremes, just factory reset them and take them with you. But anyone who has access to the device will be able to tell who were the previously associated owners. You'll get new ones once you move.

Step Seven: Buy tech in cash with no digital paper trail. You no longer give people your data. You don't give out your email, your date of birth, or your mother's maiden name to the cashier. You want to cut out any association between certain devices and you that other people could search for you. Pay cash for things and be aware of who gets what kind of information about you. But don't activate them just yet, okay? Don't create new emails or accounts until you do.

Step Eight: Adopt a new identity, legally and mentally. This is the moment you become someone else. Do it fully and legally change your name. Follow the law and get ready to become this new person. If you closed all of your accounts and paid off all your debts, you won't be required to let anyone know about the name change. Every region in the world has parts that are more flexible when it comes to published data. In the US, for example, if you were to change your name in Garnet County, North Carolina, or Medford, Oregon, the change wouldn't be made public. So now you've got a new legal identity that is not available in online databases. This will allow you to get a new set of fresh documents which you'll use moving forward. If you really want to start fresh, it helps to develop a backstory for your new identity that is plausible and easy for you to remember, aiding in your mental transition. This is the first crucial step in your disappearance. We're halfway there.

Step Nine: Travel to a touristy destination, acquire a golden visa, and disappear with your new documents and a portable store of value. You travel somewhere far away from where you used to live, preferably a touristy destination, which you'll use as a landing point for your disappearing act. If you're privileged enough to have $200 to $500,000, you can basically buy citizenship in countries that don't share their citizens' data with the rest of the world. You could also get citizenship the traditional way by staying 6 to 10 years in a country. Pick a place where you won't stand out and don’t live in a big city. Move around a bit, hop from one country to the next via public or private transport.

We'll talk about how long you'll have to move in a second, but before that, we need to talk about Step Ten: Change your habits. Your habits will change the way you feel and what people see when they look at you. Through discipline, you'll become unrecognizable to your old world. You stop doing the same things you did in the past, you avoid the same patterns of behavior, and you embrace this new identity. You allow it to shape who you are and how you act. It's crazy how much of a mental shift this all is. You left your life behind because it was broken. Without embracing a change of habit, you'll bring with you that exact same brokenness. That's what we want to avoid here, okay?

So the best way to do that is to throw yourself onto the path and stick with it. Ask yourself: What is your new identity all about? Are you looking for creative work? Are you going to live with the monks? Are you all about personal growth? Are you about health? Find that thing and then feed it with your environment and through your habits. It helps if you've got a mentor or a coach to keep you on it. If you still want all of the benefits of this change without the MI6 spy stuff, go to alux.com/slapp right now. We use large-scale academic studies and tested behavior to guide your mind to the most valuable 15 minutes of your day every day. You put your headphones on and press play, and you'll level up. Hundreds of thousands of people use our app every day, and they've seen real measurable results.

In order to win the mental and habit game, go to alux.com/slapp in order to win everything else you need to do.

Step Eleven: Choose which crowd you're going to blend with. If you just want to be left alone, look, you need to blend in, okay? You're not trying to stick out. You want to live peacefully and happily, but it doesn't need to be lonely. You need to make new friends. Introduce them to your new identity, and they'll believe that because they've got no reason not to. Your actions will speak much louder than words.

Then there's Step Twelve: Employment. Cash-based business or remote digital bank. Under the new legal identity, your new location, new habits, and new crowd will lead to new opportunities. It's up to you how out there you want to be. From starting an online business under the new identity to working only on a cash basis, there's no record of you anywhere. Since you do have documents, it won't be a problem to open up a remote online bank account just in case you need it. But note that bank accounts are one of the largest digital fingerprints you can leave. If you don't want your past life to follow you, best not give them any clues.

Step Thirteen: Minimal digital footprint under your name and surveillance. Basically, you live the same way your grandparents did. That slow life. No need to flex on social media, no need to Uber Eats your meals. You just live in peace without the inorganic dopamine hits. If you have to go online, you use a VPN to hide your online activity and opt out of any promotional materials. If you need things delivered, use a remote PO box or order stuff to an acquaintance if they're okay with it. Give them cash to order it under their name. This is how you ensure nothing is tied back to you.

Step Fourteen: Move around until you find a spot that feels right. Don't stop, keep moving! Okay, you're in search of something here. When you'll find it, you'll know it deep inside of yourself. The world is vast, and not all places are created equally. If you move around long enough, you'll discover who the hell you really are in the process. You'll rid yourself of your past life and fully convert into your new one. Once you feel that transition has been complete, it's time to put down roots.

And finally, Step Fifteen: Live a peaceful and quiet life away from it all. This is the end goal—why you've embarked on this adventure in the first place. You found peace, so enjoy it. There are many versions of this that you can end up enjoying. You could move onto the southern coast of Spain and live in a fisher village next to the beach, get lost on the streets of Tangier, Morocco, find a small rental in the old town of Zanzibar. South America is filled with opportunity, and so is Asia. With a good head on your shoulders, you can make it anywhere.

It's incredible how if you actually decided to, you could follow these 15 steps and start a fresh and new life on the other side of the world, or you could find it in a 45-minute drive away from where you live. It depends on what you're shooting for. If you had to do it, where would you disappear? Let us know in the comments. And since you're still around, here's your super secret bonus: Reinvent yourself as many times as you want.

What if every 10 years, you decided to completely change your life instead of living a single life for 70 years? Why wouldn't you reinvent yourself every decade? This decade, you'll go after money. You work as hard as you can for the decade and make as much money as you can. When the decade's over, that money life is done. The next 10 years, you can become a travel blogger, where you travel the world and document your adventures. The next 10, you can become a master of the arts, exploring your creative side.

This is how you live more lives in a single lifetime because life is supposed to be an incredible adventure—one that you embrace fully. This is why last year, we launched a flagship course called Reinvent Mastery, where in the past six months, we've helped hundreds of people completely reinvent themselves. Some of them switched countries, others careers, and others are just unrecognizable compared to their former selves. The course is locked until the end of April, but since you're a true Aluxer, we're reopening it for 48 hours right now. Go to alux.com/reinvent right now! Even better, use the promo code "My Time is Now" for $150 off at checkout.

May you use that 150 bucks toward your flight out of the country. If you're someone who looks at life as a playground, where you don't really want to be tied up to a single place, a single job for the rest of your life, and instead would rather explore what the world has to offer with your someone special, well, write the word "play" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are willing to live life differently than the rest.