Realistically, i'd go to city hall and hand in my death certificate. They'll take it in because they're not being paid enough to care. Then i'd be legally dead. Afterwards i'd go into the mountains and probably die because i don't know how to live in the mountains, but it sounded nice in my mind.

There's a Spanish movie about a guy who goes into the mountains to commit suicide but in the end chickens. Instead of going back home he stays in the mountains and lives by gathering what he can find and stealing food. He takes vegetables from the fields, steals some eggs, chickens, stuff like that. He than finds abandoned house, cleans it a bit and starts growing some food. It's based on a true story and I'm pretty sure you could still do it. There's a lot of abandoned houses where I live, the winders are mild. I will try to find that movie, they don't say a single word in it so it's not an issue it's Spanish.

If you want better quality of life you would have to go to some developing country and do physical work for cash. Even better than that would require fake documents which gets risky, especially in foreign country.

It's tricky and of course context dependent. It'd be much easier if there was no apparent motive (massive debt, impending arrest, history of fraud etc). I've often thought a holiday to a developing country with porous borders would be your best bet. If you are in a western nation it's quite difficult to disappear within your own borders, and it is hard to survive without an identity. Even then, most western nations will send someone/s to investigate your disappearance or pursue the matter via Interpol etc. Add to this your appearance is likely to raise attention if you are obviously not a local (in my case I am a white AF guy with tattoos who would not melt into the background in India). Further, no matter the money you have you ultimately want some type of identity and passport in case your current situation gets hot. In my scenario I would travel to country A using my legitimate credentials, then disappear (drowning is a good one, cheers Harold). I'd then leg it to the neighbouring country (country B) where I'd attempt to get a new identity using forgeries I'd already organised from another country different to my home. Once I can establish my identity in country B (residency over months/years etc) I'd then move to my final destination and keep my head down.

There's plenty of stories of those who try to restart and get caught (Nick Rossi, John Darwin). Common thread is they don't completely break from their previous life, or they move somewhere too obvious. Another key point is having to deal with some real sketchy people to make all of this happen properly. You'd essentially need to be smuggled across borders and acquire forged documents.

I'd be keen to hear others back-of-napkin plans.

I remember reading ages ago that the best way to get a US citizenship was to swim ashore naked and pretend to have amnesia. I guess some iteration of this should work in most countries that are not landlocked or have big rivers.

I have a friend who works at the morgue. He drives the hearse, picks up bodies that don't need autopsies, prepares the bodies, hosts the funurals, a lot of it. He knows the guys who operate the crematorium and dig the graves well. He can make a body disappear. He also finds plenty of John Does, unidentified bodies. Mostly ones that float up to the shore, severely decayed. He's told me if I needed, I'd just have to lay low for a few weeks and he'd have a body in my casket.

Be rich

Plan expedition.

Don't return.

Whatever you're trying to accomplish with your fake death, there are easier, brtter ways to do it.

Probably just try to disappear suddenly and people will just assume you died somehow. You’d have to cut-off contact with absolutely everybody. Go to a foreign country, probably third-world, where things are a bit more lax in terms of tracking people, and just start a new life there. You could try to do it in America, but it’s much harder to accomplish with licenses and social security numbers and all that required to do anything. It’s hard for a person to truly disappear innAmerica. Learning another language would be almost certainly required, though Spanish or French might get you by depending on where you went. Even English might be good enough if you went to a country with some tourism business, you might even be able to make it as a tour guide or something.

Faking your death should have a really dire reason for it. Just disappearing is much easier and safer. But I suppose the steps aren't that different.

Find a country with relaxed visa requirements. Anything where you can get married easily and obtain permanent residency will work. Solo travel to a nearby country. Find some kind of remote tourist attraction where getting lost seems plausible. Tell your friends or family you will go there. But instead of actually going there you take a land route to your final destination. Once you entered the country find someone to get married to to get permanent residency and working rights. Take their name. This step sounds harder than it is, plenty of people are willing to marry someone they just met. Don't forget you are only doing this for the visa not to actually have a fulfilled family life. So you don't have to love or even like them,

You are now in a country no one even thinks about looking for you with a new name. It wouldn't work if you are running from certain government agencies that are acively searching for you but for most other cases this should be easy enough.

You can take this step even further. For example Argentina offers you a second nationality/passport as soon as you have a Argentinian spouse. So you could repeat the steps with your new Argentinian name/passport. I am sure you will find some Argentinian willing to marry you and then let you disappear for a couple of thousands USD.

Wasn’t there a guy in the news quite recently who was discovered to be the person who walked out of his family one day and just disappeared? Apparently he was living like just a city away under a different name. That seems much easier than the other convuluted suggestions mentioned in this thread. He did get found out, but that was after so many years and because he never bothered to hide. If he moved every couple of years, he probably would’ve never been discovered.

I remember after 9/11, there were rumors that some people who were working in the towers didn't actually die, they just took the opportunity to walk away from their lives and start over. Stuff like this helped fuel that idea: https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/amphtml/postsecret-9-11-note-haunts-people-on-september-11-anniversary-37055177.html

Did people really use 9/11 as an excuse to fake their death? No idea. Maybe the whole concept was made up by surviving families in an attempt to cope with their loved one's death.

fly into outerspace, become an Ice Pirate

Realistically you'll lose your citizenship and ID. So move to a third world country and never log into your online accounts again.

So for example if you plan on walking into the mountains until people assume you’re dead and then leave, the right people will see and you’ll catch back on.

Only if you do something dumb like stick around in the same spot of wilderness for months on end. The whole point of disappearing is that you go to a new place and start a new life.

Made worse because we have progressed so far into forensics and many countries are using that to monitor peoples’ whereabouts.

Yes, but actually no. Just because they have the data doesn't mean they're actually using it. A government motivated to find you will be a huge problem to deal with. What exactly have you done to cause the government to want you specifically?

Soon there will be no running away from anything you want to run back to and no pretending to run.

Paranoid fearmongering. Breaking the law bad enough (regardless of how moral of a law it is) will absolutely get the government on your back, but just assuming that the law will turn into hellish big brother with motivated tracking is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, it's entirely possible that the current trajectory we have will get worse / follow a downward trend into 1984 style bullshit. Obviously that's why you prepare for that. But it does not mean it will follow a downward trend into 1984 territory, and assuming that it's impossible to stop that from happening means you've given up, and are therefore a part of the problem.

It’s why witness protection only works when it’s government-sponsored.

Citation needed.

I would write a note starting with something like "aaah a levifold has got-" and then I would go live with the barmaid down the road.

Not sure if it's the same everywhere, but in the country I'm from if you've been missing for 7 years they declare you legally dead, so if you have the ability to live off the radar after faking your own death anyway, I think the simplest way would probably be to just vanish and let the process run its course. Then it'd be all official anyway. Not sure what you'd do about a new identity and stuff though.

Not sure. Any time you fake your death, you have to keep in mind that living humans need food, and so it's difficult to look like you stopped eating to someone who knows enough to monitor the food consumption of an area. It's one of those "the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime" situations (that saying always struck me as odd). Food is just one thing though that could be considered an expectation you can count on for all humans in order to track someone down. Therefore, I would have to either become a nomad and escape into the wood (or maybe a cave as friends of mine would suggest) or hide in someone's house away from law enforcement, but even then a bad set of circumstances can give me away.

I would just disappear while traveling in the Himalayas or something similar.