Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

The feeling never left me. When I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I look around and judge whether or not I could disappear there. Would people find me? Would I ever run across someone I knew or who recognized me? Could I just be swallowed up by the chaos here, live in a shelter, work temp jobs in the back of a deli, and argue in broken Chinese in some broken-down Chinatown? Think of the mass appeal that a TV show like Mad Men has. It’s not for the allure of 1960s advertising culture. It’s for the fresh start the main character, Don Draper, has given himself. Don Draper, of course, lives a secret identity. And one of the best episodes to ever appear in television history was the episode “The Jet Set,” where he lived a secret identity within a secret identity—when he just simply disappeared while standing in the lobby of a hotel in California and went off with a bunch of wealthy vagabonds, each with infinitely long back stories that we would never know and never hear of again. By the time Draper emerged from this new identity, he found himself wealthy, divorced, and dealing with the questions we all grapple with: who are we, really? I have baggage. I have people I care for. Other people I’d rather avoid. I have things I hope for. I have goals and ambitions. I have grudges. No matter how much of a minimalist style you want to have, you are still stuck with all these things in your head, for better or for worse. What if you could just wake up in a new place and all the baggag...