Last week I was up on my building's roof terrace, which is where I do my best thinking in the warmer months and where I frequently have lovely conversations with my neighbors. There's one couple in particular I have the pleasure of visiting with regularly, though our meetings are never planned. One of them is the head librarian at a well-known private school in the city; her husband, like myself, is a published author. We are, by any measure, readers.
So when The Atlantic's piece "The End of Reading Is Here" came up, it landed hard for us. The article argues we're sliding into something like a post-literate era — not that people can't read, but that fewer and fewer of us choose to, in any sustained way. For a table full of people whose lives are built around books, that's not an abstract trend. It's personal.
I've been thinking about it since. Not because I disagree with the article, but because my own experience over the last three years tells a different story when it comes to literacy. I started writing a weekly blog for my real estate business, and it has made me noticeably better at my job. Perhaps not necessarily better at writing, but better at real estate. I think that's worth explaining, partly because it says something about writing that the reading conversation misses, and partly because it's genuinely how I got sharper at the work I do for clients.
Writing doesn't let you fake it
Real estate involves a lot of talking between showings, calls and negotiations. Talking has a forgiving quality. You can gesture at an idea, half-explain a financing structure, and move on before anyone notices the gap. Writing doesn't offer that mercy. A vague sentence about a new local law or co-op board requirements just sits there on the page, obviously vague, until you go find out what you actually mean.
That's the biggest shift the blog produced. Every week, some topic I used to just talk about such as a shift in inventory, an emerging trend or one of the typical questions buyers and sellers ask, became something I had to understand well enough to explain clearly in writing without glossing over any of the details. My pre-writing practice never required that kind of precision. The blog does, every Monday, without exception.
The discipline of showing up
I won't pretend the habit came easily. Early on, the hard part was purely mechanical: sitting down every week and writing something, even on weeks I had no strong opinion and nothing obviously interesting to say. That's its own kind of training in showing up to think, whether or not you feel ready. It maps directly onto the parts of this job nobody enjoys: the call you don't want to make, the number you have to deliver, the offer that has to get written at the end of the day when you are tired. You don't wait to feel ready for those either.
What's changed more recently is subtler. The discipline has flipped from forcing myself to write into something closer to a listening habit. I know Monday is coming, so all week I'm half-collecting material which might include a client's offhand question, something overheard at a showing, a comment at the office that would've once just passed by. Now it registers as a thread worth pulling. Chasing it down for the post is usually what sends me out into the larger world of the industry — reading about the housing market, market patterns, board rules — because a real estate question demands a real well thought out answer, not a vague one.
Why I read and listen differently
Funny enough, while I do read regularly and belong to the NYAC Book Club, I take in a great deal of my information through podcasts, news videos, and audiobooks mostly for a practical reason. Audio fits into time writing can't touch: driving between showings, chores, the parts of the day that would otherwise be dead time. It's efficient. I can cover a lot of market topics that way. Full disclosure: while the headline of the Atlantic piece caught my attention, I didn't actually read it! I listened to a podcast with the author on a thirty-minute drive.
Writing asks for the opposite. It demands full, undivided attention. You can't draft a post while folding laundry. That friction is exactly why it's where the actual thinking happens, rather than the passive intake that audio is good for. So I've landed on a kind of division of labor: podcasts and audible for breadth, writing for depth and clarity.
That's also why every quarter, my Quarterly Report blog post becomes a long-form YouTube video rather than the other way around. The writing comes first because that's where the argument actually gets built and the loose ends get tied off. The video only works because the thinking is already done. It's a translation of something already clarified, not a first draft of it.
What this has to do with reading
I don't think the Atlantic piece is wrong about reading. But sitting with my thoughtful neighbors on the roof, I kept thinking there's a companion story it doesn't tell: that writing, even amateur, habitual, unglamorous writing, does something reading alone can't. It forces active understanding instead of passive consumption. Three years of doing it weekly hasn't just made me a writer on the side, it's made me a sharper, better-informed agent, because I can no longer get away with almost knowing something. I have to actually know it, in sentences, every Monday.
