People who, at some point, simply decided the world wasn't worth the commute — and made their retreat permanent, dramatic, and entirely on their own terms.
Lady Hester Stanhope ran British politics from behind her uncle's dinner table, got shipwrecked, borrowed a turban, and never changed back. She rode through the Ottoman Empire dressed as a man, was crowned Queen of the Desert by Bedouin tribes, and led the first organized archaeological excavation in Palestine — unearthing a massive marble statue right where a medieval manuscript said it would be. Then she had it destroyed. She wanted the Ottomans to know she was there for knowledge, not plunder. When Britain cut her pension in 1838, she bricked up the gates of her Lebanese fortress and never came out.