So here’s the plan:
I’m 53 and I’ve decided to spend whatever years I have left on this one project.
On a personal level, the end goal is to sever every meaningful connection I have and spend the rest of my life drifting among people like a ghost—unseen, unnoticed, and unremembered—until I die somewhere no one will care to look. On the creative side, I want to document the whole thing photographically here on the blog (and through whatever other channels I build along the way): first the process of actually becoming that ghost, and later the view from inside—how the fully detached, dehumanized ghost sees and experiences a world it no longer really touches. That paragraph sums up, in plain words, what will be my entire future if everything goes according to plan.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, putting any of this into practice has already hit unexpected walls. I have a remote job that should, in theory, let me live anywhere. But European law requires me to physically spend at least half the year in the country where my contract is registered. That single rule suddenly creates a whole pile of complications—travel, visas, residency issues—that I hadn’t counted on. So as long as I need to keep working and paying taxes here, it’s logistically impossible to fully commit to the plan.
That means my life now splits into two clear phases.
Phase one lasts until retirement (about 15 years from now) or until any point when I can live without needing to work. During this time the best realistic option is preparation: building the conditions for what comes later, experimenting, gaining knowledge and experience, traveling when possible, and saving whatever resources will help when the time arrives.
Phase two begins the moment I get real freedom—no more legal ties, no more obligations. That’s when the actual ghost phase starts: full, uncompromised disappearance.
I’m deliberately not getting specific about phase two yet. Fifteen years is a long time; experience has taught me that circumstances will almost certainly force changes to the strategy or limit what’s even possible. So for now I’m keeping it at the broad concept. We’ll see what it actually looks like when I get there.
The preparation phase, though, already has concrete steps in motion.
My biggest current bottleneck is money for travel. My remote salary covers living comfortably, but it doesn’t stretch to trips. I’ve never enjoyed traveling for its own sake and I have zero interest in tourism, but both personally and creatively it matters for the plan: the experience will feed the knowledge I’ll need later, and the kind of photography I want to do here requires contact with different places and situations. So I need to figure out a way to do it. But how?
The answer is straightforward: more work.
I’ve teamed up with friends to start a small photography business focused on tourism-related projects. If it takes off, it will eat a lot of my free time and leave little room for anything else, but it should generate the extra funds this preparation stage needs. Since the work is still photography, it should also sharpen my eye and indirectly benefit the blog.
That probably means less time soon for the spontaneous, uncommissioned photography that’s the real heart of this project, and posts here may become less frequent. But I’ll do what I can to keep both going. Whenever I have a set of images I think you’ll find worth seeing, I’ll share them with you.
