I see these walks as opportunities to find out what feels important to me when I disconnect and move my body for days and days at a time. Hence, the meditations on technology. Increasingly, I feel more and more “radicalized” — not necessarily against where things are heading — but by who is leading. For example, AI will probably do a lot of good for us in the future. But the launch of a tool like OpenAI’s Sora feels like a dark inflection point in the not-so-good direction. The scale and abstraction of everything and everyone continues pushing us down paths we didn’t ask to be pushed down. I feel a deep, pervasive discomfort. How could you not? There are no adults at the helm. It’s all so breathless. Spending a morning touching ancient trees, walking in the sunlight, thinking about all the broken, low-hanging fruit that tech companies aren’t addressing, actives me. It feels like a moral duty to consider these topics, which may seem at odds with the walk itself. But it isn’t. (At least not for me.) The walk is a pushback against all of that. The walk is about reclaiming mental space to consider these things, and then to return to the Non Walk and change habits and more. For what it’s worth, books, too, feel increasingly important. I didn’t plan it this way, but I am glad to be doing the work I’m doing, and doing it in the way I’m doing it. As scale and abstraction continue to scrub away the marks of humanity (and this counts for online communities as much as war-ravaged ones), it’ll be ever more critical to go for a dumb walk, to hold a dumb paper book and give it your dumb undivided attention for two hours.

— Craig Mod, Day 6: Kiso-Fukushima to Narai, Between Two Mountains, 2025