Craig Gusmann

38: A Plea to be Less Efficient and Take More Risks

February 12, 2025 / / 0 Comments
A close-up of candles on a cake against a black background.

I think, collectively, we’ve reached a breaking point. Maybe “breaking” is too strong a word. Perhaps we’ve reached a turning point. I know I have. As I turn 38 years old and reflect on the things I’ve learned, about the world as I see it and myself, I’ve realized two things that will definitely make me better off, but I think can help others as well.

And so I have two pleas for myself and for you, dear reader: be less efficient and take more risks.

Be Less Efficient

In our need to be more “efficient” (think AI, the current gutting of our government, or even the process-heavy organization you probably work for), we run multiple risks. For one, eventually efficiency circles back around to inefficiency. Efficiency also tends to replace actual know-how.

Efficiency ==> Inefficiency: There are only so many efficiency gains you can make before you tip back to inefficiency. Perhaps this isn’t a great example, but I find it illustrative of the point I’m trying to make. Technology has gotten too simplified. In the constant streamlining of our technology, ostensibly to make it more efficient, it’s actually gotten less efficient. Before, there were dedicated buttons for each task you needed, say, your phone to perform. Now, because we’ve moved to single buttons on things like iPhone or even appliances like washers and driers, it actually takes longer to perform the task you want to accomplish. The greatest annoyance is my life is that I have to hold the power button on my headphones to get them to turn on or off. It’s only a few seconds, but it’s a waste of a few seconds and it pisses me off to no end.

Efficiency in Place of Actual Understanding: I’ve noticed this at work, primarily, and I imagine it’s a problem across most (if not all) industries. This is most noticeable with the rise of AI, but there is an argument to be made it’s gone on for much longer than that. Instead of doing the difficult work of research or even just reading to understand what it is we’re responding to, or meant to be doing, we have increasingly relied on technology and process to do that heavy lifting for us.

We use AI to summarize articles for us. We lean on process in place of seeking understanding of what we’re meant to do and why. While these things may lead to efficiency gains, are they actually helping us? Are we learning and growing when we rely on technology or process to guide us through the hard parts? What happens as technology gets less efficient or, as in the case of AI, less accurate? What happens when processes become too heavy? I don’t know, but without the understanding gained from doing the difficult parts of *insert task here*, we may lose the ability to do *insert task here* at all.

As a corollary to this, people that lean too hard on technology or process also deflect blame. It can’t be there fault if the process failed, right? If the AI didn’t have the right answer, how could they?

Be Less Efficient: I think the answer is simple, and that’s to do things the hard way. If only to understand how something is done manually, so that if a machine or process you didn’t design fucks up, you’ll be able to recognize it and fix it. That said, I do think there is value in taking the long way to accomplishing a task, sometimes. To really sit with something and work it over in your head gives you a familiarity with it that can make the eventual accomplishment that much more satisfaction.

The other argument here is that doing things the hard way generally leads to better quality. Sure, you can use AI to generate a first draft of a novel or what have you, but it’s going to be hot trash. And because you didn’t do the thinking necessary to turn a good idea into great prose, you won’t know how to fix it. In my line of work I think of this as the “baseline problem.” In my day job we often have subject matter experts helping us to write proposals. Our number one request when starting up a new proposal is to provide baseline from prior proposals to use as a starting point for the writing. The problem is that prior proposals exist in their own context for their own customers, which is likely different than the context or customer we’re currently working within. And so it becomes more work to edit the baseline than if we had just done the work up front to outline and write a crappy (but still better than baseline) first draft.

Personally, I find satisfaction in doing things the hard way. I like the sensation of, say, mowing my lawn with a push mower over a sitting mower. Or handwashing dishes over putting them in the dishwasher. There is a tactile sensation that gives me a sense of being connected with the moment, with the task, or maybe (at the risk of getting too highfalutin), the world. I feel this way about nearly everything, personally and professionally.

Take More Risks

I’ve been risk-averse most of my life. Instead of leaving my hometown at 18 to attend an arts school that had accepted me for creative writing, I stayed local. Instead of going to California and leveraging some contacts I had made to couch-surf and take a run at working in film, I went to DC. So on and so forth, decisions big and small.

Around last July, maybe early August, I decided to take a sabbatical from work. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time and kept putting off. There was always some reason not to do it–money, primarily. But with the cancer scare and the way my time keeps slipping away from me, I decided I had to. There would never be a good time, so why not just do it?

Today is day 3 of my sabbatical.

There are lots of risks. Money, for sure. But also because, for the first time in my life, I’m prioritizing myself and the things I want to accomplish. Which means, for the first time in my life, I have no excuses for not accomplishing the goals I set. Over the next four months I am responsible only to myself, which is sort of a scary place to be. If I lack discipline and don’t accomplish the goals I laid out, will I have more regrets as my time is once again eaten up after I go back to work? Will I be faced with regret, or the the knowledge that perhaps I’ll just never be successful at the things I thought I cared about so deeply since I was young?

Doesn’t matter. None of that matters right now. What matters is that I’m taking the risk to do it. Whatever the outcome is, I’ll have learned something.

And so I implore you, too, to take a risk. I can’t in good conscience recommend a risk that could upend your life (I’m certainly not doing that), but maybe you want to find a new job and are afraid of a potential pay cut or that you won’t be able to find one, or you want to buy a house and are worried about interest rates or return on investment. Maybe you want to ask a neighbor over for dinner and aren’t sure they’ll accept or that you’ll get along. Maybe you, like me, want to write something that feels true to you and are afraid it could be too revealing or that it will be rejected by those that read it.

It doesn’t matter. Do it, anyway.

It’s a cliché, but life is short. Just under three years ago I wasn’t sure I’d ever see 38. With most things in life, in failure there is always opportunity to recover.

AI’s Missing Context: Why We Create

August 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments
A robot smokes a cigarette while struggling to write its novel on a fucked up typewriter.

In October, 2023 Wired published a piece from the author Vauhini Vara titled, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.” In the essay, Vara discusses her experiments with AI, how it’s generated content has gotten purposefully worse over time, and dives into the different perspectives on AI’s use.

Specifically, she cites conversations with authors that use AI as a tool to facilitate their writing process. One author and literary critic, Adam Dalva, uses DALL-E to generate scenes that he’s imagining, then uses that as a reference for his writing. Another author, Jenny Xie, uses AI to generate parts of her narrative. Outside of Vara’s examples, I’ve heard of authors using AI to write the parts they struggle with or, in some cases, just don’t like writing. Descriptions of scenery, descriptions of people–mostly description that is necessary to paint a scene for a reader but is only ever tangentially related to the story.

Vara goes on to discuss Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” within the context of AI. The essay discusses the oftentimes vast difference in reader interpretation vs. author intent, and argues that the reader interpretation is more important. If this is true, then something like ChatGPT can generate something tailored to a specific reader, rendering an author useless at best, unnecessary at worse. Some people, like a mother Vara references in the essay, have already taken that step:

“But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.”

– Vauhini Vara, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer”

Vara touches on several other perspectives in her essay and ultimately concludes that AI lacks the human touch that separates art from product. This made me think of the tens of thousands of words I’ve read about AI over the past two years, and how few of them have talked about why readers read, and why writers write.

There are plenty of dangers with AI–the loss of creative opportunities for genuine artists, the commercialization of art, rich tech bros becoming richer off of stolen work and poor product, the degradation of literature and, ultimately, language, etc.–but one I haven’t seen grappled with is the loss of human-to-human connection. The reason I read and write is to connect with people. After language was invented, storytelling was one of the first things people did. What does it mean for our connections across time and distance if everything we read is partially or even fully a machine construct made up of recycled material?

The value of storytelling is in its perspective (something that Vara discusses in her essay), which, by its nature, is something AI cannot have regardless of how much data it is trained on. We read stories (or essays, or newspaper articles, or memoirs, or histories, or whatever) to immerse ourselves in a different perspective. Writing has always connected us. It’s how we know what it was like living in 1500s Spain. It’s how we know, in a very real, detailed way, what it was like to be a slave. It’s how we exchange information, ideas, and experiences. On more than one occasion writing has changed the world. These things happened because the person behind the writing synthesized their perspective, their experience, their morals, their humanity onto a page for others to pick up and see themselves in.

If authors start heavily using AI to generate their content, or if readers use AI to create individually tailored stories for themselves, eventually the only content AI will have to continuously train itself will be content generated by other AIs. This could realize and actual version of the dead internet. The experiences and perspectives that we’ll read in AI-generated literature will no longer reflect who we are. It may, at best, reflect who we were. But even that is probably a stretch.

I’m not one of those people that thinks AI has no place in authorial pursuits. I think it’s a tool that can be used well or can be used poorly. What worries me is the all or nothing thinking from the consumer, and the replacement mindset of the tech bros. My sole reason for reading and writing is to connect with other people. To learn from them, to understand them better, to feel like I’m not so alone.

I don’t want to see a future where that connection is lost.

37

February 12, 2024 / / 2 Comments

I think there is a perception, or at least I’ve always had the perception, that life gets easier as you get older. Maybe it’s because you gain some amount of freedom you hadn’t experienced before. Maybe you get a stable job and no longer have to worry about money (as much). You get married and have a kid (or a few) and aren’t as lonely. Or any number of possible things that can improve as time marches on.

What I’ve found over the course of my 37 years is that life is always hard for most people, most of the time. It just becomes hard in different ways. While owning a home and having a child and maintaining a marriage and having disposable income are all great things, it’s also really hard to maintain a home and raise a child and share your life and be responsible with your money. We work so goddamned hard when we’re young to lift ourselves up, earn the responsibilities that we’re told make us successful adults, but then need to learn how to shoulder the burden of those responsibilities. The margin of error shrinks with each one. It’s terrifying.

Although I’ve not quite reached middle age (all being well), I have reached a point in my life where I’m beginning to lose more than I gain. Eight years ago, I lost my grandfather. A few months after my son was born, I lost my oldest friend. This past December, I lost my mother-in-law. Going forward, I’ll likely attend more funerals than weddings. I know all too well that Death hovers near all of us, all the time, and will reach for you at random.

I say all of this only to acknowledge that life is hard. For most of us, most of the time, it’s always been hard and will continue to be hard.

And that’s okay. Because we level up as the difficulty rises. Sure, sometimes we fail, or we retreat. But most of the time we learn to manage it. We become wiser. Get stronger. Understand ourselves better. There is value in that as part of what it means to get older and to live a life well lived.

For a brief time I wasn’t sure I’d see 36, let alone 37. So, even though things are hard right now, even though most days I feel like I’m barely treading water just balancing my day-to-day responsibilities (to say nothing of my ambitions and dreams, which are largely ignored nowadays), I’m grateful to feel it at all. Feeling like I’m about to crumble under the weight of my responsibilities means I’ve built a full life. It means I’ve achieved things and now must maintain them. Feeling this way means that I am here, experiencing all that life can throw at me and I’m making it through.

After COVID, and having a child, and getting cancer, and losing people I love, I’ve realized that I am resilient. Resilient and persistent.

So are you.

Remember that as things get harder, and they will always get harder. We are resilient and persistent, and life is worthwhile because it is hard.

Craig’s Colorectal Cancer Crisis: Part III

April 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I had lost my ass. Not in the colloquial sense, like when a chronic gambler loses at the casino. I mean in a literal, inside and out sense.

The rectal resection surgery took most of my rectum. How much, I can’t say exactly, but when I asked my surgeon he said, “Most of it.” The reason they took so much was because no one was sure if the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes surrounding the tumor, so they took as much rectum as they could without my losing it completely.

To add insult to injury, because I was in the hospital with the ileus for so long and unable to eat, I lost 40lbs in just about four weeks. The weight loss stole my best feature–my perky butt. I was aghast when I went to shower, looked in the mirror, and saw that I now had a flat ass. It really drove home just how much cancer was going to take from me. Unfortunately, over the coming months this wouldn’t be the worst of my ass-related trauma.

Losing that much weight in such a short period of time has significant repercussions. Stupidly, when I was finally allowed to go home on January 14th, I thought that as long as my ileostomy continued working I would recover and start getting back to normal within a few days. Nope.

The weight loss had weakened me severely and exacerbated other issues, like the neuropathy in my left leg and both feet. For the first week or so I had very little energy and spent most of my time in bed. Stairs were a challenge, and I was often left winded just climbing the 13 steps between our first and second floors. When I tried to help with chores, like dishes, I needed to take frequent breaks because of fatigue and pain in my back and legs. Even showering was difficult.

Taking care of my son in a way that included more than sitting on the couch and watching him play or, if he felt like interacting with me, reading to him was a non-starter. I was home, but in some ways I still wasn’t able to be with him like any parent would want.

Elijah took some time to adjust to my return. While he’s always preferred Hanh in certain ways–kid is a mama’s boy–he had understandably come to rely on her for everything over the month I was gone. I wasn’t a stranger to him, not exactly, but there was definitely some distance there that was tough to acknowledge. Bedtime was especially difficult. I couldn’t help because I couldn’t lift him, and he became so reliant on Hanh helping him to sleep that if she left his room before he was in a deep sleep he would throw a tantrum. Basically, we had entered sleep training all over again.

Gradually I was able to increase my movement, then start helping with chores and child care, until my strength and energy returned to the point where it wasn’t a tragedy if I was unable to get a two-hour nap in during the day. After a month or so, maybe around mid-February, I generally felt pretty good day-to-day. The neuropathy hadn’t gone away (it never will), but I was able to do chores and even some light exercising with an elliptical and exercise bands.

I was also able to take care of my kid again. Honestly, the best exercise I have available is carrying around my 30-pound son. As my legs got stronger, the pain I felt in my left leg dissipated. It’s still there if I focus on it, but I rarely notice it on most days. Before the reverse ileostomy I was able to spend entire days with my son on my own, something that was unthinkable in January.

Caring for and adjusting to my ileostomy was a more difficult challenge. I’ll write a more detailed post about what it’s like living with an ileostomy somewhere down the line. For now, I’ll just say that it took a while for me to adjust. Not only seeing a section of my small intestine protruding from my abdomen, but learning how to manage my output. Diet is tricky with a stoma, especially if you want to live an active lifestyle and not be tied to a bathroom all the time. Eventually I learned enough about my stoma that I could sit through John Wick 4 without bursting a bag. Aside from my anxiety over the reversal surgery, there was never a time when I wasn’t counting down the days until the ileostomy was gone.

And that brings me to the story of what I came to call “Butt Stuff March.” It started with a late February check-in with my surgeon. After the health issues I’ve experienced for the past year, I’ve become a firm believer in radical transparency. If something seems weird, I’m going to mention it. Even if something doesn’t seem weird, I want my physicians to have a full understanding of what’s going on with my body just in case something is wrong that I wouldn’t know to recognize. It was with this belief in mind that I told my surgeon I was still having some bloody bowel movements.

I use the term “bowel movement” loosely, here. With an ileostomy you technically don’t have bowel movements. Food can’t make it that far into your bowels for any movements to take place. That said, your bowel does still produce mucus that needs to be flushed. In that sense, you still have to sit on the toilet and move things from time to time. In my case, sometimes I was only moving blood.

My surgeon was concerned about this. Early on it was expected that I would have blood sloshing around in my colon because of the surgery, but that should have been gone by now. He worried I had somehow developed a leak in my anastomosis. If we reversed the ostomy while I had a leak, it could kill me. At the very least I would get very sick. “I’m going to do a digital exam,” he said. I’ll spare you the details, but I did text my wife afterward to say 0/10, would not recommend.

The digital exam didn’t result in anything conclusive, which was actually encouraging because if there was something conclusive it would have meant something was terribly wrong. My surgeon outlined a plan for the next few weeks. A sigmoidoscopy with a stiff camera to see if anything was wrong up there, and then a barium enema that would show if there were any leaks.

The following Monday I had the sigmoidoscopy. I was put under general ansthesia and nothing seemed amiss, but I was quite sore afterward. The Monday after that, March 13th, was the barium enema. You aren’t given anything for enemas. You just go in, they shove a tube up your ass, pump your colon full of fluid, take x-rays, then send you home. I assumed that it would be easier than the digital exam. I was wrong.

I laid on a hard, cold table on my left side, with my right leg pulled up toward my chest. Before they started the procedure I caught a glimpse of the enema catheter and was surprised at its size. In hindsight, perhaps this was a mistake. It probably made me tense up. The nurse started the insertion and I was in immediate discomfort. The doctor, bless his heart, tried to help me relax by talking me through it, but I was in genuine pain. The nurse struggled to insert the catheter, even asking if I’d like to do it (I assume because sometimes people either have some experience doing at-home enemas or at least know their own bodies well enough to navigate the insertion process–at the time I had neither). I declined.

After an excruciating minute or so they gave up and said they were going to try a foley catheter, which is much smaller. The problem we faced was that with a small catheter I wouldn’t retain the fluid that helps x-ray clarity, which means the results would be suspect. They successfully inserted the smaller catheter, started pumping the fluid into my colon, and I almost immediately felt it coming back out and spilling down my leg. They asked me to clench. No dice. This wouldn’t work.

The doctor came to me and said they were going to try the full-size catheter one more time. If I was in too much pain, or they couldn’t get it in, they’d give up and my surgeon would have to figure out another way to check for a leak. He explained that for most people, the initial discomfort goes away after 30 seconds or so. The nurse rounded on me again and this time was able to insert the catheter and inflate the balloon that was to keep all the fluid inside me.

Unfortunately, the discomfort did not dissipate after 30 seconds. In fact, I was in quite a bit of pain the entire time. But I got through it. Afterward, I voided the liquids that were in my colon and asked if it should have a red tint. The nurses replied that the fluid should be clear. Apparently I was bleeding. Again, I spent the rest of that day and the next quite sore.

A few days later my surgeon gave me the results of the enema. It was a good thing I had stuck it out, because they found a leak. My ileostomy reversal would need to be delayed at least two months. I was also to go in for another colonoscopy with the intent to find the leak and patch it in the hopes it would heal faster. That Friday, March 17th, I met the specialist who would do the patching. She explained that with leaks as small as mine there was no guarantee they would even find it, let alone be able to patch it.

“Butt Stuff March” continued the following Tuesday, March 21, with two at-home enemas and the colonoscopy. The at-home enemas were easier on me than the barium enema, although I also don’t think I did them 100% correctly. I did them well enough that my colon was clean for the specialist, but only barely.

As you can imagine, I was pretty down as I headed to the hospital for this next procedure. Nothing had gone my way over the last several weeks, I was in a lot of discomfort from weekly plundering of my backside, and the specialist seemed pessimistic that they would even be able to do anything about it. I was put under general anesthesia expecting the worst and telling one of the nurses how much I missed my cat in the moment. The adorable demon below, specifically.

I awoke some time later already resigned to the fact that my ileostomy would be with me for at least two more months, if not longer. I had read stories from other people on ostomy forums that had their ileostomies for years before getting them reversed. A nurse approached and told me that they didn’t find any leak. They had shot fluid into my colon and it didn’t go anywhere.

I started to cry, then had to explain to the nurse that they were happy tears. The specialist eventually came by and explained that my anastomosis (i.e., where they had stapled my insides together) had formed a pouch that caught the fluids they shot up there. The x-ray misinterpreted that as a leak.

I was good to go forward with the ileostomy reversal.

36

February 12, 2023 / / 0 Comments
I wouldn’t stop for Death, so he kindly stopped for me. I ran away.

Each year on my birthday I try to find something revealing and maybe insightful to say. How successful I’ve been at that only you, dear reader, can tell me. This year, though, feels different. My cancer diagnosis has changed my perspective on life a bit. It’s made me more grateful for the time I have, more determined to make the most of it, and more cognizant of what’s important to me.

In my prior birthday posts I sometimes spoke about getting older. I don’t think I realized then that getting older isn’t a guarantee. Being more attuned to the cancer community I’ve been exposed to people much sicker than I ever was, including a few that did die young. I wonder what their plans for the future were. I wonder what opportunities and ambitions they passed up thinking that they would have more time, or more money, or more energy in a future they’ll now never get to see. And I wonder what sort of amazing things we lost in them not getting one.

Luckily, I am still here and (hopefully) will be for at least a little while longer. So let’s talk about my hopes for the future. Things I want to do. Works I want to create. Ways I want to make the world a distant fraction of a percent better than it is right now. Consider this something of a bucket list.

  1. Be there for Elijah as he grows up: Obvious, I know, but it’s my main motivation for doing whatever I can to grow old. I want to see the type of man my son becomes. I want to help guide him into being that man. I want to meet his children. More than anything. If the rest of my life is a huge waste, this will still make it worthwhile.
  2. Gift Elijah Money: What I mean by this is that I want to save money specifically for him to have when he becomes an adult. Not a college fund necessarily because he may not want to go to college, but a nice chunk of change for him to decide what to do with. Travel? Sure. Buy a house? Okay. Save and invest? Good idea. Go to trade school? Sounds great. Start a business? Go for it. The point is to give him the head start my wife and I weren’t afforded, and also maybe avoid some of those predatory loans young people are forced into.
  3. Take my family to Vietnam: My wife was born there, but hasn’t been back since she was a young girl. I want to experience her birth country with her, and I know she wants to share that with our son.
  4. Go back to Greece: A few years ago we took a cruise around the Greek Isles. While I’m sour on cruises because of their terrible environmental impact (and because my wife doesn’t have much in the way of sea legs), our experiences in Greece were amazing. We’d like to go back.
  5. See America: This country I live in is huge, with myriad cultures and experiences to be explored. I want to do a solid sampler platter of it all. Big cities, small towns, remote forests–pretty much everything except maybe the desert. Not huge on sand.
  6. Visit all 32 NHL Arenas / Cities: Even though the NHL is problematic, and hockey in general has a shit culture, I love the sport. I love playing it, watching it, and investing in it. And since each NHL team is based in a medium-to-large city, it’s a good excuse to do some traveling and sight-seeing. So far, I’ve only hit Buffalo (duh), Philadelphia (duh again), and Montreal. Still have 29 to go.
  7. Make a Movie: I’ve been saving and investing with the hopes of eventually having enough money to make a microbudget film. I think I have the right script idea, so now I just need to write it, fund it, and gather cast and crew. In my head it’s totally doable. In reality, it’ll be tough.
  8. Write Like I’m Running Out of Time: I have so many story ideas I’m excited about. Pulpy action / horror stories, sci-fi action comedy, existential stories about religion and grief, and stories I’ve tried telling in the past but didn’t have the skills to get them right. I want to write it all before I run out of time. It’s not really possible, is it? I’ll always have new ideas that I’m excited about. But I can try.
  9. Reenter the Screenwriting Arena: I haven’t written a full screenplay since 2015 or so. I was pretty good at it, but not quite good enough to break through. I think with the experience I’ve gained writing short stories and novels, plus the life experiences I’ve had since then, I could write something special.
  10. Create a Webseries: I initially meant to do this last year, but then, ya know, cancer. It’s something I can write, shoot, act in, and edit myself. I think the idea is pretty good, but the execution will be tricky as a one-man show. Maybe this year will be the year.
  11. Publish: My ultimate goal is to be a hybrid author. Right now I want to traditionally publish my novels and self-publish novellas and short story collections, as I did with Anh Nguyen and Through Dark Into Light.
  12. Get Involved in Politics: I’ve always had an interest in politics. That’s why I minored in Political Science. Getting involved, though, has always eluded me. It’s hard to know how, which isn’t a good excuse. There are also time considerations, and if you really pursue politics the issue of being a public figure (no matter how minor). It’s an ugly arena, but a necessary one.
  13. Volunteer: Again, time is tough to overcome here. Volunteering and politics are closely related in my mind, as depending on where you volunteer that act on its own can be considered a political act. Mostly, though, I just want to contribute positively to people’s lives in some way.
  14. Earn Decent Passive Income: I’m slowly working on this. Between publishing and investing, I have some passive income coming in, but it’s really only worth a couple of decent dinners per year right now. I’m not going to be paying the mortgage with it anytime soon. The goal, then, is to get to that point.

Obviously, a lot of these goals could be broken into sub-goals. I have specific places in America I would like to see, specific areas I would like to volunteer, etc. But as a broad list to look forward to for whatever might be left of my life (if cancer doesn’t get me, maybe an assassin will?) I think it’s a good one.

Now to just make it happen.

« Older posts

Don’t wait, contact me today!

Get at me

© 2025 Craig Gusmann

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑