A couple of years back, I traded (temporarily, it turned out), field-based trail work for a desk job at a regional environmental nonprofit. My modest white-collar salary was twice what I’d been paid at any previous job. But my days felt both hectic and aimless, a sloppy collage of sitting in Zoom meetings, responding to a self-replenishing firehouse of emails and Slack messages, and making endless tiny tweaks to our volunteer management system.
I quit my “real job” after less than a year, went back to hiking a saw into the woods. I had thought I’d be able to handle a desk job; I was used to spending winters writing and studying, after all. It was only later that it clicked for me: at the nonprofit, I hadn’t been making anything. Writing may not be literally physical, but in that it involves building things out of tangible parts—constructing sentences, mucking about, laying out a line—it feels much more like manual labor, with its satisfaction of craft and creation, than a computer job does.
This past February, only a year after being back at the Forest Service, I was abruptly fired, along with almost the entire recreation staff of my ranger district. About six weeks later, after multiple lawsuits, we were reinstated, but warned that more legally defensible layoffs were likely coming. We could take our chances, or we could accept a deferred resignation offer, under which we’d be placed on administrative leave and paid our normal salary through the end of September. Feeling backed into a corner, I accepted the offer. Maybe, I thought, it was a blessing in disguise. I could use the time and the funds to focus on writing.
Instead, without the work that gave me a deep sense of both physical and moral purpose—but paid little more than my state’s minimum wage—I spiraled and raged. The DOGE blood-money paychecks, as I thought of them, started to feel less like an unexpected bonus and more like long-overdue back pay for years of undervalued labor.
And here I was, thinking I could use the modest extra support to put more effort into writing: another abysmally underpaid profession. Everything I’d devoted my life to, it seemed—vocations I had stuck with because they offered work I was both good at and believed in—apparently had little value to society, if such value is quantified, under capitalism, as the amount of money one can be paid to produce something.
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