Craig Mod

Writer, walker, and book-maker in Japan whose newsletters, essays, and walking memoir form the single most-highlighted voice in this library.

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and independent book-maker based in Japan, and by volume the most-highlighted author here — spanning his Roden and Ridgeline newsletters, his essays on software and reading, his members-only Special Projects work, and his walking memoir Things Become Other Things. The through-line across all of it is a single obsession: how to build a life of fullness and clear attention against a world engineered to fragment it. His tools for that project are concrete and recurring — long solo walks along Japan's back roads, the slow relationship-time of kissa coffee shops, fast software and well-made physical books, and the deliberate friction of film cameras and paper. He writes as an atheist who has decided the "onus to motivate to live fully... falls squarely on your adult-ass shoulders, and yours alone."¹

The preoccupations

mindmap
  root((Craig Mod))
    Walking
      the re-walk
      solo asceticism
      creative wells in boredom
    Japan
      kissa culture
      B-side cities
      Shinto-Buddhist syncretism
    Attention
      attention monsters
      dopamine casinos
      identity as a reader
    Craft
      fast software
      physical books
      film's artificial friction

Walking as practice: "the only true walk is the re-walk"

Walking is the engine of everything else. Mod describes craving "the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks," insisting there is "no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking" — the space of a "walk-induced hypnosis" where the mind can "receive the strange gifts and charities of the world."² Repetition is the point, not novelty: "I've come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning."² Over time the solo walks "became tools, platforms for thinking, for drawing the wider world in closer and making the inner world visible," and finally an ascetic practice that creates "a space for an aggregate change of the heart and mind."²

Why does walking unlock creativity? Because it strips away the phone. "It's only in the crushing silences of boredom — without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells," he argues.³ Even the walk itself is framed as a moral act: apropos of a walk reported for the New York Times, he calls it "a kind of genuflection towards peace, and acknowledgment of the fragility of all the things past which the walk takes you."⁴ And the labor is unglamorous and unwitnessed — after burning himself dry on a 40,000-word pop-up newsletter push, the lesson that stuck was that "the true work is on the road, doing the hard thing again and again... regardless of if anyone is watching."⁵

Japan: kissa culture, aura, and B-side cities

Mod's Japan is not the postcard. His signature subject is the kissa — the indie, owner-run coffee shop, subject of his book Kissa by Kissa — which he defends against the "gods of homogenization." Chain cafes are "easy" and "reliable" but "gut the possibility for depth of relationship on both sides"; a place like the six-decade-old Saboten instead becomes "a constant... welcome in a world increasingly deprived of constants."⁶ He reaches for Walter Benjamin to explain why: mass digital objects "contain no 'aura,'" so Gen Z gravitates back to cassettes, vinyl, and film cameras — onerous, fiddly things that offer "the opportunity for a relationship to develop" and a "patina of experience."⁶ His bookmaking philosophy runs on the same wire: "Food encodes culture. And by eating and paying close attention, you can debug or decompile strands of culture that led to x or y ending up in your mouth."⁷

His model of a good life is the human-scale "B-side" city. Championing Yamaguchi for the NYT's "52 Places," he writes that if Kyoto and Hiroshima are the A-sides of Japan, "Yamaguchi and Morioka are B-sides — the side often containing the true, understated genius of a record," places where "good life is possible... on a human scale, operating within the bounds of a warm community." He travels not for the perfect croissant but for "archetypes of ways of living that set my imagination ablaze."⁸ The country's texture surfaces throughout: the animistic playfulness of Shinto kami, its syncretism with imported Buddhism until the 1868 shinbutsu bunri law severed them,⁹ and an ethic of ownership captured in the Japanese approach to litter — "Be an adult. Own your garbage" — which he sets against the modern "constant self-infantilization" of "plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up."¹⁰

Attention monsters and the identity of a reader

Mod's most cited theme is the fight for attention, and his framework is the "contract" we enter with each medium. Physical books endure because of their immutability: "The immutability of printed books is their superpower... it's from this immutability that books derive their dead-simple 'contract.'"¹¹ The enemy is anything on the other side: "The main adversary of books and book publishing is: Anything that eats attention" — the "attention monsters."¹¹ Apps grow more predatory as they scale, engineering "unpredictable hits of dopamine," and Netflix is "designed to be a boundless slurry of content poured directly into your eyeballs... training us to never step back."¹¹

His counter-strategy is behavioral, and openly indebted to Atomic Habits: "True behavior change is identity change."¹¹ He engineers friction deliberately — "The best way to guarantee success is by preemptively engineering systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones" — carrying a Kindle everywhere so that "it [is] as easy to reach for a book as it is to reach for my phone," and blocking media on that phone to protect his identity as a "reader."¹¹ He distinguishes "motion" (researching) from "action" (getting the reps in), and insists deep reading is "an active exhaustion, the result of burned calories."¹¹ The reading he cares about is specific: "focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand," feeling "our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text."¹² The enabling rituals are physical — the phone banished to another room, and, famously, "I haven't slept with a phone in my bedroom in over a decade."¹² "Richness," he says, is "being offline, away from the din of connectivity... engaging directly with one or two well-considered things."¹³

Craft: fast software and looking closely

Mod applies the same standard — care, fluency, trust — to tools. In "Fast Software, the Best Software" he argues "speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality... I want all my craftspeople to stickle," and speed "would make me trust it more."¹⁴ His ideal is software that improves with age: he loves "software that unbloats over time... the longer it's around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone."¹⁴ The cautionary tale is Google Maps "dying a tragic, public death by a thousand cuts of slowness," where speed even leaks into wording — the macOS "Delete, Cancel, Save" dialog where "pressing delete feels violent."¹⁴ The broader diagnosis, in "Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump," is that hardware has outrun software; the fix is not "splashy masthead features" but "consistency + reliability = fluency," and a culture change to "elevate user fluency to first-class rank."¹⁵

Craft, for Mod, is ultimately about attention itself. "Looking closely is everything" — but "really looking" requires "an almost 'unlooking'... a kind of defocusing," because "we tend to see in groups, not details."¹⁶ Focused attention is "implicitly timeless... the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time," like a seasoned meditation session where "time simply evaporates."¹⁶ This is why he embraces the "artificial friction" of shooting film: each frame "counts and costs," which "causes me to look more closely," makes him think "much much much more about the light," and leaves him a "physical archive of negatives... Durable evidence of life and work done."¹⁷ Humans, he notes, "thrive on ridiculous, difficult-to-justify endeavors — creatively, especially."¹⁷

Things Become Other Things: grief, class, and impermanence

His walking memoir Things Become Other Things — a walk of the Kii Peninsula's Kumano Kodō, addressed to a murdered childhood friend — is where the walking and the mortality fuse. It braids Shinto-Buddhist syncretism with a hard-edged reflection on the "scarcity mindset" of a working-class childhood: "Spend youth in our scarcity mindset... and the voice never really disappears. Somewhere, in a corner of our minds, is a little kid forever ready to go to the mat."¹⁸ Grief keeps its own room in the mind — the friend's murder "lives in a small box in a windowless room down a dark hallway in the back of my mind. Emits faint noises daily."¹⁸ Encountering a country that cares for its people through healthcare and schools, he registers it as luck — "a place where people were taken care of by the greater whole"¹⁸ — and the walk becomes the vehicle for that reckoning. The presence he prizes is Wenders' Hirayama in Perfect Days: "Hirayama is not searching." Being there before a thing arrives "is what all the work, all the prep is about... Solitude not only helps, but is essential."¹⁹

The system behind the work

Mod is, self-admittedly, a creature of "schedules and deadlines," and Atomic Habits "helped me understand why that is."¹ His identity was deliberately chosen: to be "someone who publishes regularly, who writes about walking... and, ideally, produces unique, beautiful books."¹ The infrastructure is notable because parts of it overlap with this library's own tooling. Mod is an advisor to Readwise; he has used its services "for nearly a decade," praises the Reader app for long-form reading, and — after being "broken by whatever chemical sorcery happens when you pick up an iPhone" — found in the BOOX Palma E Ink device a way to "untether the quietude of E Ink reading from proprietary hardware."²⁰ His archive lives in Obsidian, though grudgingly: "I have like a love/hate relationship with Obsidian... I mainly just use it with the Readwise plugin," relying on it as "a great Archive of highlights and notes."²¹ He is a voracious, promiscuous reader — riffing on Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, Percival Everett's James, Larry Brown, Norman Maclean, and Patricia Lockwood in a single breath.²¹

Related

• Walking as Practice
• Japan
• Reading, Analog, and the Physical World
• Design as Craft and Simplicity
• Mortality, Impermanence, and Meaning
• The Attention Economy and Dopamine Culture
• Habits, Discipline, and Self-Improvement
• James Clear & Atomic Habits
• Readwise & Reader
• Obsidian
• Overview