00:44 - Pandemic Life

• Politics


• Healthcare


• Society


• Work

13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment

• Personal Development and Self-Discovery
  
  
  
  
  • Brené Brown
  
  
  • Glennon Doyle
  
  
  • Elizabeth Gilbert
  
  


• Nihilism


• Manifestation


• Gratitude & Daily Journaling
  
  
  
  
  • Morning Pages
  
  
  • EarlyWords
  
  

29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic

• Intention and Ritual


• Terry Pratchett


• Franz Anton Mesmer


• The Placebo Effect
  
  
  
  
  • Zenify Stress Relief Drink
  
  


• Effort and Intention

Reflections:

Mandy: Everyone should journal. Reflect on the past and bring it to the present.

Damien: Bringing magic into non-magical environments.

Aaron: Ritual, intention, reflection, alignment.

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Transcript:

DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 277 of Greater Than Code. I am Damien Burke and I'm joined with Aaron Aldrich.

AARON: Hi, I am Aaron and I am here with Mandy.

MANDY: Hello, everybody. I'm Mandy Moore and today, it's just the three of us!

So if you came expecting more than that, I'm sorry.

[laughter]

We’re what you get today, but hopefully, we can have a great conversation and we were thinking that we would talk about all the things. I'm doing big hand gestures right now because there's been so many things happening since 2020 that are still happening and how our perspectives have changed.

For one, I, myself, can tell you I have grown so much as a person in 2 years. And I'm curious to hear how the two of you have been living your lives since the pandemic.

DAMIEN: [chuckles] Where to begin.

AARON: I know. It's such a good topic because I feel like everyone's had so much to change, but at the same time, it's like, okay, so 2 million years ago at the beginning of this pandemic.

I'm now my third place, third job since the beginning of the pandemic as well and wow, I came out as non-binary in the middle of the pandemic [laughs]. So that was a whole thing, too.

I think the question I asked earlier is how much have you radicalized your politics over the course of the past 2 years? [laughs]

DAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. That's been bouncing around in my head since you said it off mic.

Every time I hear the word pandemic now, I think about, “Oh man,” I hesitate on how far to go into this. [laughs] Because I look at the techno-anarchist crypto bros and I can I say that disparagingly and I will say that disparagingly because I was like them. [laughs] I filled out a survey today and they asked like, “How do you rate yourself as on a conservative and liberal scale?” I'm like, “Well, I think I'm super conservative.” And I still do and every time I align with any political policy, it's always an alignment with people who call themselves socialists and leftists and why is that? [laughs] Hmm.

[laughter]

But anyway, that was the part I was trying not to go back into. [laughs]

One of the big realizations in living in a pandemic is that healthcare is not an exclusive good.

MANDY: What?

[laughter]

DAMIEN: That is to say that I cannot, as an individual, take care of my own health outside of the health of the community and society I live in. Didn't know that. In my defense, I hadn't thought about it, [laughs] but that was an amazing realization.

AARON: No, I think that was a big thing. I think so much of the pandemic exposed the way our systems are all interconnected. Exposed the societal things. Like so much we rely on is part of the society that we've built and when things don't work, it's like, well, now what? I don't have any mechanism to do anything on my own. What do we do?

DAMIEN: Yeah. It's so fundamental in humanity that we are in society. We are in community. We only survive as a group. That's a fundamental aspect of the species and as much as we would like to stake our own claim and move out to a homestead and depend on no one other than ourselves, that is not a viable option for human beings.

AARON: Right, yeah. Even out here in rural Vermont with animals and things, we're still pretty dependent on all of the services that are [chuckles] provided around. I'm still on municipal electric service and everything else. There's still dependence and we still rely on our neighbors and everyone else to keep us sane in other ways.

DAMIEN: Yeah, and I feel like people in rural areas—and correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't lived in a rural area in maybe ever—have a better understanding of their independence. You know your neighbors because you need to depend on them. In the city—I live in Los Angeles—we depend on faceless institutions and systems.

AARON: Yeah.

DAMIEN: And so, we can easily be blind to them.

AARON: Yeah. I think it mixes in other ways. I get to travel a bit for work and visit cities, and then I end up coming back out into the rural America to live. So I enjoy seeing both of it because in what I've seen in city spaces is so much has to be formalized because it's such a big deal. There are so many people involved in the system. We need a formal system with someone in charge to run it so that the average everyday person doesn't have to figure out how do I move trash from inside the city outside the city.

[laughter]

We can make that a group of people's job to deal with.

Here, it's much more like, “Well, you can pay this service to do it, or that's where the dump is so can just take care of it yourself if you want.” “Well, this farm will take your food scraps for you so you can just bring this stuff over there if you want.” It's just very funny. It just pops up in these individual pockets and things that need group answers are sometimes like pushed to the town. You get small town drama because like everyone gets to know about what's happening with the road and have an opinion on the town budget as opposed to like, I don't know, isn't that why we hire a whole department to deal with this? [laughs]

DAMIEN: Yeah, but small town drama is way better than big town drama. The fact that half of LA's budget goes to policing is a secret. People don't know that.

AARON: Yeah.

DAMIEN: Between the LA Police Department and LA Sheriff's Department, they have a larger budget than the military of Ukraine. That's the sort of thing that wouldn't happen – [overtalk]

AARON: Don't look at the NYPD budget then.

DAMIEN: Which is bigger still, yeah.

[laughter]

That's not the sort thing that would happen in a small town where everybody's involved and in that business.

AARON: Yeah. It happens in other weird ways, but it's interesting. This is stuff that I don't know how has, if it's changed during pandemic times. Although, I guess I've started to pay attention more to local politics and trying to be like, “Oh, this is where real people affecting decisions get made every day are at the municipal levels, the city level.” These are things that if we pass a policy to take care of unhoused, or to change police budget, this affects people right now.

It's not like, “Oh, wow, that takes time to go into effect and set up a department to eventually go do things.” It's like, “No, we're going to go change something materially.” It's hard to compare the two because the town I'm in rents a police officer part-time from the next [laughs] municipality over. So the comparison to doesn't really work.

[laughter]

DAMIEN: Everybody knows exactly how much that costs, too.

AARON: We do. I just had to vote on it a couple Tuesdays ago.

[laughter]

DAMIEN: So then I think back to how that has impacted – I'm always trying to bring this podcast more into tech because I feel guilty about that. [laughs] About just wandering off into other things.

But I think about how that impacts how I work in the organizations I work in. Hmm. I recognize I'm learning more about myself and how much I can love just sitting down with an editor and churn out awesome code, awesome features, and awesome products. That brings me so much joy and I don't want to do anything else.

And what we do has impact and so, it's so beneficial to be aware of the organization I'm in what it's doing, what the product is doing, how that’s impacting people. Sometimes, that involves a lot