Can i just disappear

Sugimoto is currently staying in a home tucked away in a residential district of Tokyo. She was a jouhatsu herself, who went missing 17 years ago. Everybody has individual struggles. For people like Sugimoto, her company helped him address those struggles of his own.

The companies that help people vanish. Share using Email. Each year, some choose to 'disappear' and abandon their lives, jobs, homes and families. In Japan, there are companies that can help those looking to escape into thin air. Stopped all of it. And people were sad, and concerned, maybe even a little horrified.

The show posits that he has a darker sadness under the visible effervescence that has come to define him, but ultimately, no one truly understood why Simmons or anyone else for that matter would just want to disappear. For that I am thankful.

But as part of my depression, I have experienced the pervasive, oppressive desire to disappear. With depression, isolation is a common symptom. Due to the exhausting weight of depression, you cut yourself off from other people. For me, even the idea of calling my best friends in these moments feels like an impossible task, no different from running a full marathon. It just seems hard and exhausting. So the notion of never seeing or talking to another person ever again seems not only possible, but preferable.

My anxiety level has increased massively since they were born. Kids are stressful and a lot of work. This guilt is deep and difficult. And when I feel that hard pull in my heart, the one that wishes it could all go away, all of it, every last bit, that guilt is there. As women, we feel compelled to make life work.

Flailing desperately, he gasped that he was having trouble breathing. A moment later, as the current pulled him downstream, his head dipped below the surface and didn't reappear. A frantic call from Monica minutes later launched a search-and-rescue operation involving more than 60 people. Dive teams scoured the river, and a plane scanned the area from overhead. The next morning, Sheppard's shell-shocked coworkers brought their own boats up to help with the search. They found his fluorescent orange Eaton cap in shallow water not far downstream.

But when 24 hours passed without another sign, the authorities abandoned — publicly, at least — any hope of finding him alive. The urge to disappear , to shed one's identity and reemerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It's a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life's daily burdens.

A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply awaken one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had.

And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life's baggage, and start over as someone else? Most of us snuff out the question instantly or toy with it occasionally as a harmless mental escape hatch. But every year, thousands of adults decide to act on it, walking out the door with no plan to return and no desire to be found.

The precise number is elusive. Nearly , Americans over age 18 were recorded missing by law enforcement in , but they represent only a fraction of the intentional missing: Many aren't reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And according to a British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave. People who go missing do so with an endless variety of motives, from the considered to the impulsive. There are of course those running from their own transgressions: Ponzi schemers, bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, or insurance scammers dreaming of life in a tropical paradise.

But most people who abandon their lives do so for noncriminal reasons — relationship breakups, family pressures, financial obligations, or a simple desire for reinvention. The federal government's Witness Security Program provides new identities for endangered witnesses, but thousands of people who testify in lower-profile cases are on their own to face potential retribution or flee to a safer identity.

So too are those trying to escape the unwanted attention of stalkers, obsessive ex-spouses, or psychotically disgruntled clients.

Starting over, however, is not as simple as it used to be. Yesteryear's Day of the Jackal-like methods for adopting a new identity — peruse a graveyard, pick out a name, obtain a birth certificate — have given way to online markets for social security numbers and Photoshop forgeries.

Escapees can set up new addresses online, disguise their communications through anonymous email, and hide behind prepaid phones. In other ways, however, the advantage has tipped in favor of investigators. Where once you could move a few states over, adopt a new name, and live on with minimal risk, today your trail is littered with digital bread crumbs dropped by GPS-enabled cell phones, electronic bank transactions, IP addresses, airline ID checks, and, increasingly, the clues you voluntarily leave behind on social networking sites.

It's almost easier to steal an identity today than to shed your own. Investigators can utilize crosslinked government and private databases, easy public distribution of information via the Internet and television, and data tucked away in corporate files to track you without leaving their desks. Even the most clever disappearing act is easily undone.

One poorly considered email or oversharing tweet and there will be a knock at your door. As missing-person investigators like to say, they can make a thousand mistakes. You only have to make one. When Roberson arrived, the company was holding an all-hands meeting announcing Sheppard's presumed death. After noticing discrepancies in Sheppard's employment record, Roberson spoke with the Eaton human resources folks, who told him that two weeks earlier they had alerted Sheppard to suspicions that he'd been misusing his corporate credit card.

When Sheppard's body didn't turn up after another day, Roberson's curiosity deepened. He knew that Sheppard carried a company BlackBerry; his wife had told police it must have gone in the water with him. On Wednesday, Roberson asked Eaton to check for any activity on it. Sure enough, they discovered text messages sent after he had supposedly drowned. As far as Roberson was concerned, the rescue operation was now a manhunt.

Tracking the numbers texted from the phone didn't turn up anybody's account. Roberson concluded they were prepaid cell phones. When he tried to reinterview Monica Sheppard, she'd retained a lawyer and refused to cooperate.

A few months later, she sold everything and moved away with her daughter. After that, Roberson says, "the trail went cold. We just flagged everything we could find.

Roberson contacted border security in case Sheppard used his passport and asked the IRS to watch for any W-2 filed with his Social Security number on it. When Monica took off without leaving a forwarding address, Roberson also contacted the local elementary school Sheppard's daughter had attended, asking it to get in touch if anyone requested the girl's records. Tennessee specifically outlaws "intentionally and falsely creating the impression that any person is deceased," but strictly speaking, in most places there is nothing illegal about walking away from your life.

Still, it's easy enough to run afoul of the law in the process of fleeing, whether through abandoned debts or identity theft. Insurance claims based on fake deaths — besides being illegal — are naturally frowned upon by insurance companies, who tend to pursue them to the ends of the earth. New York City- and Texas-based investigator Steven Rambam has conducted several thousand missing-person searches over almost three decades. He made a name for himself in the '90s tracking down suspected Nazi war criminals in hiding.

Sardonic and brash, with a thick Brooklyn accent, he has a knack for using technology to find people who don't want to be found. For Rambam, the proliferation of increasingly comprehensive data collection has been a boon. Even as anonymization technology improves, to the benefit of fugitives, "the ability to pull data from remote locations and cross-reference that data has increased even faster," he says.

To enhance his ability to search everything from DMV records to college yearbook photos, Rambam created his own investigative search engine and database, PallTech.

It's so good that other licensed investigators and law enforcement agents pay to use it. Given a name, date of birth, and Social Security number, PallTech churns through hundreds of databases — collections of private and public records — and spits out up to pages of investigative fodder like addresses, relatives' names, and aliases.

It also enables elaborate combinations of searches, based on, say, a first name and month of birth. All of which helps investigators exploit the most common error made by people starting over: using details from their old lives in their new lives as a way to help keep things straight. There's also plenty of private data that makes your life easier — and your pursuer's, too. Take frequent flier accounts, Rambam says. Exactly how investigators get that data depends on who is missing and the persistence of who is searching.

Court-ordered subpoenas can give law enforcement — or private investigators hired onto the case — access to everything from ISPs to airline companies. Other times investigators may get more creative, scouring the runner's abandoned laptop or persuading a colleague to hand over an email that might contain a location-revealing IP address.

They might enlist the public's help, using cold-case Web sites to spread pictures and collect tips.