When it comes to the written word, I’ve spent most of my life consuming others’. And for the most part, I’ve loved every letter. Covers always drew me in, but good writing kept me around: R.L. Stine, Into Thin Air, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King (Harry Potter… well, at least until The Order of the Phoenix when I was stuck by the Disillusionment Charm, “the best one ever”, they said.) And not just books: there was Time Magazine for Kids, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, then I fell in love with The Economist around high school after spotting a cover story about China and the U.S. at an airport newsstand in Europe as I returned from a month in East Africa. I had started to see the world, and here was a magazine that could take me to every corner each week!

Then in college, the digital world started to trickle in: first, with blogs about Macs and tiny little versions of the NY Times on my first iPhone (Thanks Mom and Dad 😊). Then posts on Facebook, Instagram captions, and a few memorable blogs: the odd couple of Last Night’s Party and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York stand out amid the noise. Eventually, well-written “junk” became a slight addiction: BBC News, Medium self-improvement articles, long-form Guardian articles for sheer sensation, and Gawker became the staple of my mid-work bathroom routine.

Finally, during COVID, I came to rely on Reddit for budgeting skills, relationship advice, and the comment section of r/PublicFreakout (an artistic realm that could exceed the raw sensationalism of the New York Post with the unmatched cool wit of a Tumblr gif about French love). But beyond reposting a few links, like every other reading source I’d ever stumbled upon, my engagement felt one-sided, and here for the first time, I started to truly question why I spent so much time reading, saving, expanding, collapsing, trusting the words of complete - and usually faceless - strangers around the world.

And very recently, it’s occurred to me that reading alone isn’t merely a matter of choosing to trust and spend time in the minds of strangers. It’s a choice that comes at the cost of thinking, creating, and even living my own life. How many articles have I clicked on, simply because the title told me what I wanted to hear, and not read a single word of the actual article? How many stories have I fought through, hoping they would be the story I actually wanted to read? How many times have I opted to live through somebody else’s words and experiences, rather than sought to go out and make my own. When I picked up that first issue of the Economist at the Hudson’s in Germany, barely showered after nearly a month of living in the mountains of Tanzania, I didn’t realize that it would be pretty much the last truly immersive trip of my life (at least still the case now, at 37). The Economist made it to easy and pleasant to feel like I was going around the world each week, albeit to talk about gold prices in London and to speculate on the metaphor of eating siracha sauce vs. being a middle manager in South East Asia.

This isn’t to say that I suddenly hate reading, or regret everything I’ve read (although it’s been years since I ready truly deeply). I didn’t appreciate in college, but I’ve known for a while that writing is an effective tool for expressing or learning to better express your thoughts. And it’s hardly the case that I’ve never written anything myself: poems, a few articles, code, Slack messages, deeply thoughtful letters to my fraternity brothers. Even in high school, I knew writing was something I did and could do well. But now that I’m hitting mid-life, I’m realizing it’s time to be a little more thoughtful, a little more intentional, a little deeper about how I think, act, and live. Yes, I have ideas and ambitions that would actually require me to be more writer-ly: career thoughts, creative stuff, heck maybe even some occasional deep investigative journalism (Even as the world probably becomes a less reader-ly place). But I really just want to understand the world better, for myself. And more importantly, live it for myself. So I’ll make time to go do it. Thanks for reading writing!