If you want privacy and you drive a car, I got bad news for you. Public Transit is privacy.

I’ve long held that my phone is a single point of failure and that I should be able to function without it. So I don’t do banking on my phone, I still carry a wallet even if I do have Apple Pay and I will certainly carry physical identification until I’m legally unable to.

Turn off broadcast of the SSID

Don’t do this. It provides zero security, and just reduces usability. Now you should call your SSID something non-identifiable. So instead of “$YourName Wifi” call it “pleasure chest” or something. Additionally do not set a ridiculous 64 character + special characters password, because again you are providing next to zero additional security, while hugely reducing usability.

Use a simple password scheme of 3-5 unrelated common words like from here: https://www.correcthorsebatterystaple.net/index.html for your wifi password.

I guess having a thick provisioned VM image on your laptop means that you are hiding something. Again if the evil government you are trying to hide something from doesn’t need reasonableness as a reason to detain you, then who cares? No matter what you do you are rolling the dice every time you interact with them.

Which is of course similar to the US today, so if I needed to hide something from them I’d make sure that once i’m legally compelled to give my password they at the very least wouldn’t have what they are looking for, since there is no way I could prove I didn’t have it anyway.

Beat what out of you? You already gave them a password that decrypts a specific file/volume/etc. If they want to beat you, they will beat you regardless of your possession of any encrypted materials.

They know it exist as a concept. They can’t prove that the specific decrypted message contains a super-secret encrypted message as well.