Wasting Time
Confessions of a Bad Capitalist
A few important emails dropped into my inbox this week. I noticed them just before turning my phone on airplane mode, as I do 2-4 days of the week. Since this is the routine, it feels essential to be forthright with the people beckoning me about my time constraints. That is, I compress my online workweek into a short window to ensure I can immerse myself in the most important matters of field research.
I swear I am also very busy writing. And reading. A few days ago, Aaron and I discussed Ivan Illich’s H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness for an hour while waiting out the midday heat. This is a book philosophizing about how the evolution of our modern toilet system has altered our relationship with water. Important stuff. And better contemplated close to water sources than actual toilets. We look forward to reading Illich’s other tomes, especially The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies.
When I send these email replies, I momentarily contemplate the steps I may be taking toward professional suicide. Until I pull out my notes beside the river. There, I regain composure and remember that one of the perks of being self-employed is choosing when to work and where. This is part of my business’s mental and physical healthcare benefits package. I certainly risk being misconstrued as a lazy bum. But a recent email from Brett Van Emst, editor of Midnight Mind Magazine, eased my worries.
“Wasting Time.” That was the subject line of an email requesting a short submission with a tight turnaround. I replied with a list of excuses. That email is what he published as “Bad Capitalist” in issue eight.
Midnight Mind Magazine is a delightfully irreverent cultural review print publication that Van Emst resurrected from a 20-year hiatus. Past contributors included Jim Harrison, and two essays from the last issue are nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The current issue is in color, and I particularly enjoy random photographs from the seventies and postcard ephemera. Nostalgia scrolling.
Though “Bad Capitalist” is far from the type of deeply researched and pined-over work I masochistically love to write, seeing it in print is an antidote to the pressures of a late-stage-capitalism-writing life. That is the constant pressure to pursue and accept every opportunity to exchange words for coins at rates that have hardly increased since the 1980s (when I was born).
Do not misconstrue “Bad Capitalist” with “Evil Capitalists taking over the federal government and building data centers in the Sonoran Desert.” I mean, I am not a very productive member of this capitalist system I am entangled with. When considered through the lens of another system, those spoken in hushed McCarthyesque tones these days, I remember I am thriving!
I frequently waste time noting old publishing rates and daydreaming about the desert writing shack I could have afforded in the decades of yore. If that were possible, I wouldn’t waste so much time putting boxes of books in storage, winter after winter, while I worried about where to go next. Instead of real housing solutions, this summer, many of us fought a massive proposed public land sale under the guise of increasing available housing. And they just won’t give it up.
There’s a lot to worry about. And wasting time might save us. Van Emst writes, “Let’s waste some time together. I realize it’s completely unrealistic to expect everyone chill and relax given the current climate going on in the country…I am tired of everyone saying, ‘this is not normal,’ because it seems to be exactly that. So it appears we need to be in this for the long haul.”
The work to be done, to protect our fellow humans and the natural world, does not end with this, or any, administration. Van Emst writes, “I know that now is not the opportune time to turn off, but if we don’t selectively do it for ourselves, we run the risk of burning out. And people who are burned out, give up.” It echoes Edward Abbey’s plea to environmentalists that we’ve all read:
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
The few sentences published as “Bad Capitalist” might be some of the most affirming for my writing right now. That is, admitting and celebrating the need to not work. It’s a drain to devote all writing time to the rigors of reporting or assignments. The stress manifests in one way or another, even if you are keeping your cool.
The same goes for calling our representatives. There were a few weeks where it felt good to work up some rage before dialing. Right now, I admit to needing ample wasted time and maybe a beer before I can muster it. I imagine I am not alone in feeling this way. Hats off to groups like Outdoor Alliance for creating time-saving forms to reduce the barriers. The Roadless Rule is another law this administration wants to roll back time on (aka waste it).
It’s not healthy or sane to react to every single thing going on. But it’s important to have some non-negotiables that keep me engaged between healthy doses of fully dropping out for a few hours, or a day or two.
Like this: the House Appropriations Committee released its fiscal year 2026 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. A rider (section 137) on the Bill takes aim at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by prohibiting the use of the current management plan. Instead, the Bureau of Management would be forced to adhere to outdated standards from 2020, during Trump’s 50% reduction of the 1.9 million-acre monument.
If passed, this steers all national monument protections in a dangerous direction, putting their meaning at risk. And it stalls important efforts toward elevating Indigenous voices in public land management. This spring, representatives of six Southwestern tribes announced the formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition. They are following the model of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the moral force behind the 2016 establishment of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
This will also waste the time and money that went into the current management plan, created with input from local shareholders and community members, for one that will be inefficient and inadequate for the monument. Talk about inefficient time and money wasting. It effectively shrinks Biden’s restored monument boundaries without the current President shrinking them–– which he has his eyes on. This change would open areas of the monument to development in the meantime.
A group of over 65 organizations wrote a letter urging House Leadership to protect Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from House members who are sneaking this rider into the appropriations process. You can call your reps and tell them what you think about it, too!
The proposed appropriations bill also includes deep cuts to the Interior Department, EPA (newly gutted of its scientific research branch), and BLM budgets. Lawmakers are hoping to finalize the budgets by September 30, but E&E News notes that Congress did not pass a final appropriations bill last year. Let’s not $%! around and find out, though, because Congress slashed over $1 billion from public broadcasting.
Growing up, PBS was the only channel, besides news in Spanish, that my siblings and I were allowed to binge-watch. We were outside playing most of the time. Aaron was a WGBH Boston PBS kid. We both make the trademark station sound when we see great blue herons, GBH, on the river. Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street. The children’s shows were, and still are, wholesome, fostering learning, teaching kindness and empathy. The adult shows expanded my world-view beyond American suburbia: NATURE, NOVA, Mystery, Julia Child, Are You Being Served? And none of this tries to sell us anything, to quote LeVar Burton. What’s not to love there? As this administration is actively dismantling the Department of Education, it’s scary to imagine what they want kids and adults to watch instead. Hmmm…
To cope with the world, I still waste lots of time under the Reading Rainbow. Van Emst’s magazine intro points to reading as his time waster of choice, which is not a time waster at all because “it makes you think and engages you and gets you curious.” Of late, I have disappeared into Basin and Range by John McPhee, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, and as mentioned, Illich’s toilet-water philosophy. Wow to all!
As a book nerd, one of my favorite things to do is trade books with other authors. This book also affirms my poor capitalistic values. I’m looking at a brand new stack that entered my life through an exchange of words for words. The price is right! More on that in another post.
I need to go now. There is a lot of work to do with my limited screen time, including a few emails to send to my reps. I hope you find a way to waste some time this summer. It’s worth the extra effort!
Last summer, I managed to fully log out of the interwebs for several weeks. I cannot fully commit to the same right now because of some exciting things that I get to share. Path of Light won the Utah Book Award for memoir/narrative. It is an honor to share this award with Christopher Cokinos’s Still As Bright.
To celebrate, I would like send new paid subscribers ($60) a free signed copy of Path of Light until August 6! (While my supplies last.) All of this is an affirmation that books (and everything we write) gain value from being read, not looking pretty on the shelf. Thank you for being an essential part of this, just by wasting some good time here. 🧡
“Let’s waste some time together. I realize it’s completely unrealistic to expect everyone chill and relax given the current climate going on in the country…I am tired of everyone saying, ‘this is not normal,’ because it seems to be exactly that. So it appears we need to be in this for the long haul.”
I love this. Wonderful stuff, as always, Morgan.
I’m 69 and a bad capitalist. Always have been. I made 18K/yr in 1985 and still have not exceeded that. Today I (somehow) live on only Social Security at a whopping 13,368/yr. In California. I should be spanked and sent back to good capitalist school.
In the earlier 2000s I built a strawbale cabin on a friend’s property 6 miles north of La Sal UT (between Moab and Monticello). Spent $3,000 dollars total (inc. a small solar) by foraging off the land for gravel, juniper beams (standing dead), and free old tires for a foundation top. Bad capitalist again, for sure. Got me and my partner thinking about the utter insanity of society creating a human waste system that puts fecal contaminants into water, which everyone knows percolates through ground into other waters. So we built a free compost toilet with wood pallets, local straw, and pasture-fed horse and cattle manure. To be then used as humanure after a couple years. Bad, bad capitalists we were—then as well as now.
Point? We can do it! Morgan, thanks for showing we don’t have to be slaves to a system. There ARE ways around it; just takes some creativity and a willingness to let some of the extraneous fall away into a simpler lifestyle.
Thank you, Morgan! I love your lifestyle and writing — wish there was more of it…