How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch (+ Book Club Discussion)

Over the summer of 2019, I took a social media hiatus and completely deactivated everything. That spring, I had not been doing well, and experienced a series of unfortunate events; I couldn't imagine anything other than disappearing.

The summer was refreshing. I traveled and I worked and I danced, all of which filled me back up again. I had this strange pivot from fiction, devouring every psychology read I could in an attempt to largely understand. When I emerged back into the land of the living that fall, I was well and truly an entirely different person—the first time in my life that I'd felt my personality do a complete one-eighty. (I did a deep dive on the science of personality testing too, and had I read those same books before the spring, they likely would have had entirely different answers to "who I was.")

I first read How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch that year. In 2020, I did a lot of thinking around topics like digital minimalism and the contrast between online identity and in-real-life, and whether it means anything for those two things to overlap or diverge significantly. What's an attempt to preserve memory versus an insecure need to be visible?

Over the past four years, I've had a funny relationship with visibility. Being visible on my blog and social media has led me to every significant opportunity I've ever had, and is the through-thread of effort that's given me a job doing what I genuinely care about. I have an instinctive knack to share what I'm curating and thinking about (perhaps because we get a hit of dopamine when we share our opinions with others) and that means I do feel like I'm sacrificing some career momentum whenever I take a step back from what I'm good at.

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Firstly, I am a freelance journalist and I've gotten most of my paid work through editors seeing my articles via Instagram; being online is also a necessity for me having a pulse on modern culture and trends. Secondly, I want a book deal and a successful career as an author. A platform is by no means a requirement for fiction but could only ever help. In such an uncertain industry, in pursuit of such a significant, everlasting life dream—well, I'm going to do my damned hardest to maintain any advantage I can shape.

Social media and the Internet are very much intertwined with my ability to have the creative freedoms I want. Still, there are absolutely so many times in which I feel the pressure of being watched (whether well-meaning or not), or the self-consciousness of being very visible via social media. When I'm having a rough time, I definitely don't want to feel seen, and it's easy to go down a rabbit hole of talking about one topic online and feeling like that's all people see you as—like it flattens their understanding of you. It's easy to feel like you are "too much" or "too intense" for others (a common critique of yours truly.)

Phone usage and online presences are easy to demonize as being wholly unnecessary beyond personal vanity, but I'm not sure it's that simple either.

I'm also an identical twin. My sister and I have talked at length about how much of our respective fuels, burdens, and personalities are a direct result of being consolidated in a way others will never understand. We have a strange perspective on visibility versus invisibility, collectivism vs. individualism, and the like. I wouldn't be running this blog for 13 years and counting had I not initially needed to strike out from my sister in order to be valued.

I feel like I likely have a healthy relationship with my visibility now, especially as it relates to how I portray myself image-wise. I had the conversation recently with somebody about how I held myself to high standards and preferred to appear polished, aesthetic, etc,. but I'm not sure they fully understood that wasn't related to self-esteem or caring about others' opinions so much as tapping into the confidence of knowing who I am: the audience being a collective block I bounce off of, like the reaction that intensifies my initial effort. I don't think I'm lying when I say I don't care about appearances for the social sake, but rather as a way to be expressive and tune into myself — which doesn't feel shallow at all.

I feel genuine online and like I can properly express myself on platforms like my blog (although I could keep talking about this topic for ages, so the well of conversation here is forever deep), but I don't necessarily crave social validation from it. I think what I do is really cool, don't get me wrong—but I almost feel like because I'm sharing what I love and what I'm thinking about that I don't so much use my social media for social posturing on a friend- or social-circle level, so don't get very self-conscious about it impacting my relationships. I don't post my relationships or social outings much. Sometimes I think maybe I should for the memory preservation, or to prove something was significant.

In 2024, four years after initially reading this book, I'm still figuring out what my ideal balance of visibility is in the current climate, especially with such pressure to produce produce produce. So this book feels relevant now and always.

How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

It is time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, autonomy, and voice.

In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more alluring. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and promote ourselves. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but from vast and pervasive technology companies that want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life--for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world's most exotic and remote places, she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared to the way Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway finds a sense of affiliation with the world around her as she ages, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness.

How to Disappear is a unique and exhilarating accomplishment, overturning the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of remaining inconspicuous, and finding genuine alternatives to a life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and intrusive world.

My Thoughts Now (2024)

There is a lot I love about this book, and so many subtopics I could branch into when discussing it. The book's reverence for nature is always gorgeous to read, reminding me of Mary Oliver's stunning meditations in the woods. (See: Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver.)

I think about the nature drawing class I took in 2019, in which we returned to the same square of the woods every morning to detail exactly how it changed. I think about how a school of fish has collective thoughts and how I wrote that into my book when talking about community memory and passed-down traditions. I definitely think about grind culture and how the solution to getting everything I want seems to always involve putting myself into the public eye, for better or for worse.

How to Disappear can get a little holier-than-thou, for sure, but I like that it takes such a direct tack. I love how meandering it gets, how it's part reflection and part reference, pulling in biology and psychology and modern culture in a way that all feels very natural for the topic even if you don't agree.

It's short, which is lovely, and I often find myself underlining a majority of the page.

““When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power?”

My line thus far has been that I generally share a lot of what I'm working on and thinking about on the Internet, but keep my social life largely offline. I'm very aware of the aesthetic value of my photography (see: The Social Photo by Nathan Jurgenson) and what I post, but often wrestle with the awareness that people tend to assume aesthetic beauty is emotional beauty: that if I post a photo of a beautiful place, everything must be fine and dandy because it looks good. It's instinct; they can't help it. But if I had a dime for every "you're living my dream life"?

It leads to such an interesting dichotomy of thought re: authenticity and transparency. I feel like anything I post will still get misconstrued by virtue of being curated by when I'm in the singular mood to post. (Thinking especially about David Levithan's book, Every You, Every Me. Every me cannot know every you because there's a version of yourself that you only are when I'm not around.)

Only a small sliver of me makes it to Instagram and yet it's entered our lives as a third space of sorts. (See: The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital Age by Lawrence Scott, which offered such a fascinating method of looking at it: that when we look at our phones, we can picture ourselves physically exiting our bodies to be online. Essentially, we are no longer present.)

“Valuing interior experience is vital to developing a sense of self, and how we reveal ourselves to the outside world has everything to do with how we stay out of view when we need to.”

This summer, I was tempted to deactivate the accounts for a while but could really only justify a few weeks. Even then, I was keenly aware that thanks to my goals, I won't have that luxury for a very long time again. As soon as I go out on submission with my manuscript, I'll want my accounts to be easy to reference; if I (hopefully) got a book deal, I'd have to be online to engage with readers—unless I were really that famous á la Suzanne Collins that I didn't have to.

Having someone else manage your accounts doesn't scratch that "wanting to be invisible" itch either. It's not even that someone is perceiving you that makes you feel visible, but rather that someone can perceive the idea of you.

So what's the proper balance?

My sister and I have both had the fear of invisibility fuel our professional and personal lives. She's talked about it in personal essays as being a driving force behind wanting to make others feel seen and connected. I've talked about it in the context of developing very singular, devoted interests in art and writing that are now linked to my ability to publish and be visible. For example, I know my prose is better when I'm writing for an audience versus for myself. I even know while exercising that I get a better workout if I do it somewhere with social pressure: running along a busy walking path where friends could see me, or attending a popular class. Visibility can be a really helpful motivator, or even a reminder to get out of your own head. Making your world smaller and more interior can almost be self-absorbed because you're not giving others enough credit for how they affect you.

In the same vein, there's such a rush of self-confidence that comes with knowing that you are the same person in public and private, that you love your own company, that you have immensely satisfying rhythms of living that don't require external validation to feel right. I tend to go too far in the other direction into hyperindependence, so have been working this year on being more open to others. There's absolutely a whole conversation to be had about how to extricate the concept of invisibility from the concept of loneliness, and how that may be a reason many struggle with the idea.

When is it most healthy to want to be seen, versus when is it not?

The Review I Wrote in 2020

I could go on for significantly longer about this book and this topic, but I did rediscover my review from 2020 when transferring my blog archive to the new site, and was definitely struck by how deeply I connected to the concepts Busch wrote about at the time:

It feels ironic to be writing and publicizing a post on invisibility when the act of publishing is, by definition, transparent. While I’m grateful to be back on campus again this fall, it’s definitely a small school and small community in which invisibility is mostly impossible. Anonymity is relatively difficult (and undesirable, because you don’t get the same comfort of being around a cluster of strangers.) But sometimes you just need to ghost. I used to study in coffeeshops because I’m most focused when I’m around people, but not people I know. That state is pretty much impossible here, when you know almost everyone who walks into where you are — or are connected to them in some way. (Complement that thought with a fascinating read on social networks.)

My relationship with invisibility, especially in the age of social media when a handful of people know me as the girl from Instagram, is a complicated one. On one hand, I’m shy and introverted, especially at school; on the other, I have specific tastes and deep interests, which manifest in highly visible ways.

My summer of being invisible was such a luxury — something I relished and appreciated. It feels less doable here. I would go offline in a heartbeat again, but here it’s more of an escape than a hindrance.

In the winter, it was refreshing on a few occasions to go out to dinner alone, or to disappear into the woods for an afternoon instead of being on campus in the same apartments, spilling over with all the people you spend all your time with (and love, regardless.)

As I’ve mentioned, I have a few monthly reads queued up as reminders of some values that I cherished over the summer: digital minimalism, humility, appreciating place, and prioritizing character. Somehow, this trajectory emerged as a cobbled-together theme.

I wasn’t sure what function How to Disappear would serve — a how-to guide, full of the practical, or a philosophy. It ended up being a great look at how we define our identities, and how visibility interacts with that process.

MY THOUGHTS (from 2020)

How to Disappear starts out with personal reflection on being in nature, an immediate first person narrative. There’s lush description of color and trees — a quality always guaranteed to draw me in. The detail is expansive, and a little much at times, but underscores the emphasis on how much more you notice when you’re attuned to silence. (There was an excellent Brain Pickings quote in a post the other day, regarding that.)

“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything. —Gordon Hempton.”

How to Disappear then takes the idea of invisibility literally, going into a discussion of how our vision affects our experience. As it states, humans have “diverse ways of being seen and unseen.” It casually references discussions of narcissism, improved technology, marginalized groups going unseen, flow states — all topics that beautifully illustrate our complicated culture. Invisibility can be a privilege too. Like, I’m not sure I would have had the same response to this book had I read this last winter.

“A new vocabulary has emerged for this visibility. The word optics now has less to do with the science of light and more with how visual impressions of events and issues may be more important than the events and issues themselves.”

I want to go in a thousand different directions with discussing this book and the various topics that arise within it. Like, one idea I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is that of a model of something, a representation.

Or like The Memory Illusion (one of my favorite, most disturbing books of the summer) discussed, that our representations of ourselves on social media become versions of ourselves equally as valid as those we engage with in person. Or I’ve always thought that sometimes I love photos of certain places more than the places themselves. That doesn’t often happen, because I love being outside too much, but sometimes a stunning photo of a natural scene takes my breath away in a way that’s difficult to replicate. Visual impressions as more important.

I’m astonished by the ability of the book to rope in all these different topics and effortlessly transition between them; it’s elegant, in a word. And it nails the balance between being technical and investigative in certain areas while still offering personal observations and reflections. It roots a lot of it in empathy and smallness of self as conducive to experiences of awe. And the scope of what it talks about is even more impressive because it’s a relatively short volume.

“The unspoken has an accuracy of its own…when I was growing up, he told me that the human mind was designed to forget, designed to filter information and select the things that mattered, and that it sometimes succeeded at this, but not always.”

It’s one of those books that feels like it has the whole world in it.

It talked about other bits of visibility and invisibility that so poignantly illustrated ways the natural world grapples with that balance. For example, mimicry in nature. Extending that discussion to mimicry and camouflage in humans, ways we conceal ourselves in society.

In some ways, camouflage is more frustrating to me than invisibility. Blending together. Apathy. (My favorite people are intentional ones.) I dislike the feeling of being interchangeable, although I do relish being unseen. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one, and one that How to Disappear articulated so much better than I ever could. I got really into the idea of essentialism this summer, which, according to Google is,

“a belief that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are, and that the task of science and philosophy is their discovery and expression; the doctrine that essence is prior to existence.”

Essentialism meshes well with the specificity of what I love, and alleviates the nerves we all seem to get when we worry that others will forget about us when we’re not around.

This book just understood all of it, and gave me so much to think about. In certain ways, it’s so relatable — the type of read I want to shove into all my friends’ arms in the hopes that they connect with some of the transitory coming-of-age type questions. In other ways, it’s just so sophisticated and thoughtful in a way that’s so admirable, that makes me so jealous that Busch was able to word all of it so beautifully. It’s a meaningful read, and concise.

“Facial recognition systems, retinal scanning, and biometric tools that can read everything from voice and heart rate to hormone levels and brain waves have given us nearly infinite ways in which to know ourselves. Now if there were only as many ways to forget ourselves.”

I appreciated the musings on identity, because that’s something I’ve had a lot of questions about lately. A lot of philosophy gets too dense about it, and to a certain extent, overthinking your identity is enormously unhelpful.

What keeps you the same person? What do you love about the people you love? How visible are we to others? Which “version” of yourself are you at a given time, and which ones are true — or most important? (See: Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Brian R. Little, which talks about the fluidity of identity over time and the flaws of personality testing like the Myers-Briggs.)

I want to talk with someone who reads this about the instability of the human character — the studies that show how little of ourselves remains the same over the years — or what remains the same — and how hard that is to pin down. That the only constant is choosing to see yourself as the same person.

“The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been.”

“Contemporary identity politics ask for a deep appraisal of what makes us who we are. We all want to be recognized and identified precisely and accurately. We want the images we have of ourselves to be true.”

I ALSO LOVED

• Descriptions of the calm of being underwater — a concept first illuminated to me in reading The Blue Mind, a recommendation from a friend, but supported by everything else I’ve read.
• Gorgeous imagery describing animals — How to Disappear had a sublime way of reminding us of the big picture, especially in regards to nature. There were so many descriptions of sinuous beings interacting with their surroundings, which Busch tied effortlessly to some beautiful reflection on some esoteric topic relating to visibility.
• SO many lines I wanted to underline — the problem with writing this review is that there are so many tangents I want to go on, so many lines I want to include. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that if I included everything that I wanted to, the review would be the entire book.

In essence, How to Disappear is a marvel. It’s smart and spot-on, with poetry and gravitas. I keep wanting to use the word “gorgeous,” which it is, but it gets repetitive. My head is spinning. Read it, so I have someone to talk to about it! It will definitely reappear on the blog, as I continue to mull over its importance and refine how to actually talk about it. It’s on the favorites list for sure.

In summary

In both 2020 and 2024, this book has been significant to me and my identity formation for different reasons. For years, I've said that I want to be funded to be able to work on the projects that I want to and write what I want to—which, in this day and age, requires a certain proportion of visibility and access. For example, the only way the influencer model works on a psychological level is that we've cultivated parasocial relationships with people online who we don't really (or at least, fully) know. (See: The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell, which is a delight in its high-low analysis.)

In some ways, being so public about who I am and what I want has made me more private and sacred about the spheres of my life I choose not to share, but I'm very aware that at least for now, I can't choose to be "invisible" overall. Still, it's always worth mulling over how people see me online versus how I'd like them to see me—whether it's holistic enough, and whether I even want it to be a full glimpse of me as a person.

And, of course, I always just love waltzing off into the woods for some phoneless forest bathing time. Mary had that right.

If you'd also like to spark an existential spiral about identity, aesthetics, visibility, and the role of awe in all of it—be sure to check my reading list and report back.