Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

When I was a kid, I bought the book How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. I don’t know if any of the techniques still work but here was the author’s plan: Look at old newspapers from around the day you were born to find the names of babies that died that day. Ask members of your state government for their birth certificates. This isn’t unusual. Many people lose their birth certificates. Use the birth certificate to get a Social Security card (say you’ve been a permanent student up until now). Use the two forms of ID to get a bank account, credit cards, and driver’s license. Change your hair color. Lose weight. Put a tack in your shoe so you start to walk differently. Start siphoning money out of your bank account until it is all in cash. Find a crowded city where you can rent an apartment cheap, and disappear in the crowd. Plan on building an employment history by starting with temp or construction jobs. Then disappear. Just walk out of your house and never go back. You’ve just committed pseudocide. The word pseudocide fascinates me. It’s like a “little death,” a phrase often used to describe an orgasm. The book had anecdotal stories of people who had disappeared (how the author kept finding these people was never explained). People running from marriages, lawsuits, the IRS, or maybe just every now and then someone who needed an eraser, some Wite-Out to rub over emotions, fears, and anxieties. A clean slate that would bring a temporary nirvana where some, if not ...