Mindset of the Gray Man
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
-Abraham Lincoln
If you are considering living as a Gray Man, never forget that it all begins in your mind.
The first hurdle is choosing to walk this path. Making up your mind to go the gray route has to do with YOUR life and how YOU choose to live it. Going gray is not necessarily a major life decision for most, of course, but it IS a decision. And to make such a decision, you need information in order to ensure it is an INFORMED decision.
I offer you here some things to ponder, from the perspective of a man who has been a federal law enforcement special agent and is currently a private investigator. I have spent significant time in my career working criminal, counterterrorism, and counter-intelligence cases. To be successful at this kind of work requires, amongst other things, some outstanding training and a lot of time on surveillance, being functionally invisible while watching people. Some of those people were very highly trained in how to spot surveillance and to counter it. Being a Gray Man professionally was often, literally, a matter or survival.
First of all, ask yourself some questions as a thought exercise. Do I WANT to be a Gray Man? Do I want to make the necessary adjustments to my lifestyle to purposefully lower my profile? Do I really NEED to go gray? What and how much do I have to change to become a Gray Man?
If the answers to these questions still have you believing that you want to live a lower profile life, I imagine you might then consider how far to go down this road. The level and depth to which you wish to go gray will impact many future decisions. Are you going to be a dilettante and simply toy at being gray? Are you going to go “hard core” about things and attempt to disappear off the grid, vanishing from society completely? Or are you going to walk some middle path, trying to live your best life, largely unnoticed by those around you whom you do not know? It is this last roll that I try to lead and the one I believe is attractive to the largest number of people, not to mention the most realistic and achievable.
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
-May Oliver
Having settled on the idea of going gray, your mental involvement has not ended. Far from it. When actually living as a Gray Man, the first and arguably most important step is to stay mentally engaged. A truly Gray Man does not go about in public mindlessly, but rather keeps his wits about him and actually perceives what he sees. That is to say, it is not enough to look around thoughtlessly. Instead, pay attention! Stay aware of your situation, that is to say what is going on with you and around you.
Most people go through their daily lives with a surprisingly small amount of conscious thought involving their current surroundings. It is far more common for people to navigate the world with a minimum of mental engagement, using a small amount of mental capacity to avoid crashing into things and getting injured. The rest of their available mental bandwidth is generally occupied with thinking about all manner of other factors in their lives. This is a huge mistake, even if you are NOT trying to live a low-profile life. Remember, not seeing a car will not protect you from getting run over by it.
Think about this in your own life. Ever been walking across a parking lot, paying almost no attention to what is going on around you while you are talking on the phone or going over a seemingly endless list of personal and professional tasks you have to complete? Ever drive anywhere and have no clear memory of the details of the trip? The demands on our lives these days are strong and time seems increasingly scarce. It is no wonder people appear to move around in a fog, trapped in a bubble of their own concerns!
This can hinder a Gray Man if it happens to him. Do not fall into this trap. Unless you are home alone, keep your mind on what you are doing. Walking, driving, whatever. Do not “zone out”! Maintain situational awareness simply by casually looking around an taking note of what you perceive. Your mind is your single greatest asset when trying to live a low-profile life. Use it! Staying mentally engaged is also the single hardest part of being a successful Gray Man. As simple as it sounds, it is not easy.
At the same time, this tendency towards a lack of mindfulness helps a Gray Man immeasurably when it happens to others. Because so many people are walking the earth paying little or no attention to their surroundings, it can be very easy for a Gray Man to go unnoticed. Especially when he is mentally engaged while others are not. Always use this lack of attention in others to your advantage. Avoid doing anything that might deliberately raise your profile and you will pass unnoticed by the vast majority of normal people living their lives.
Of course, those unengaged people are rarely any kind of threat, beyond accidental. It is a different story when you are trying to avoid rousing the attention of professional watchers.
Happily, there are relatively few real, well-trained surveillance professionals in the world. This is even true in the law enforcement and private detective professions. Of course, even completely untrained, non-professionals can conduct successful surveillance, undetected, thanks to the mass tendency to not pay attention. Look at how successful criminals can be and they are generally completely untrained! It is experience that helps most of these people, cop or criminal, in watching others, in picking out the person or persons they are looking for in a crowd.
They know first-hand that most people are clueless to their surroundings. They use this fact, and a few simple surveillance techniques, to spot their quarry, to mark their passage, and when necessary, to follow them for their own purposes. Simply paying attention can go a long way towards stymieing even these efforts.
Remember, in all likelihood you are NOT the subject of professional surveillance, unless you are a foreign intelligence agent or a professional criminal. If you are in those occupations, you probably do not need to be reading this. And for those who are not “in the game”, understand this: If you ARE being professionally surveilled, you are screwed beyond the means of this writing to help you. You have already done something to raise your profile way too far. For those who are not on such a list, I suggest you do not get on one.
Decide that you are going to obey the law. Do not have a mindset of “What can I get away with?” Instead, live your life within the bounds set by society. Criminals, and that is what you are when you chose to break the law, attract attention. All kinds of attention. And that is not what a Gray Man wants to do.
Stay calm and even keeled as much as possible. Do not be prone to “flying off the handle” and screaming at people. If you currently tend to be loud and obnoxious, modify that, in public at least. Forceful, loud, opinionated people tend to draw attention. Friendly, happy people who are easy to deal with leave observers feeling good and wanting to help them are less memorable. They rarely stand out in the minds of others for long, beyond “What a nice, regular guy”.
Think before you act. Do things deliberately. Consider where you are going and what you are doing. Do you really need to go there? If you do, is it imperative that you go there now? Consider a trip to Wal-Mart, for example. Going at 2:00 PM is vastly different than going at 2:00 AM. Live your life as you see fit but think as you do so. When you are going to go somewhere, consider how you need to prepare before you go. Sort of a mission analysis, if you will. Where am I going and what am I going to be doing? Once these are established, it makes it easier to tailor your approach to the situation.
The truth of the matter is that, no matter how difficult a target you are, no matter how tough it might be to successfully attack you, you CAN be victimized by a determined opponent who marks you as a victim then chooses the time and place of their attack. Pursuing a low-profile lifestyle reduces the chances that you will be noticed and selected as a victim in the first place. The objective is to remain out of the potential victim pool in the first place by “flying under the radar”. There is a very simple, very good reason the best trained combat soldiers in the world wear camouflage. They do not want to be seen until they choose to be seen, so they attempt to blend into the background of their environment. I suggest that this is a very good approach.
Do not opt to be a victim. The point behind all of this is that you are trying not to be selected for victimization by anyone. You are going the route of the Gray Man because you have chosen to live your life unafraid, largely because you are unobserved. People leave you alone because they do not notice that you are there. Certainly, you are prepared for the unexpected, ready to escape a problem if it still finds you, to the point of forcing the issue if you must. But the best route is always avoidance when that is an option, or surprise if it is not. And the Gray Man is all about options.
