Musings & Links for February 20, 2026

Free will is a myth

Happy Friday friends,

I hope you’ve had a good week. A bit of personal news — after six months of trying my hand at engineering management, I stepped down from leadership and returned to being an individual contributor on the same team. The engineering/management pendulum is pretty well documented at this point, and I’m swinging back to the “engineering” side of things. A number of factors precipitated this decision, but I am very happy with it. There’s unprecedented opportunity to build and try new things in software right now, and I’m excited to have some space to focus my attention again and create stuff.

Anyway, here are some things for your weekend.

• Front Porch Republic published a review of Martin Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild. Shaw is a mythologist, and part a cohort of historically “pagan” writers who’ve converted to Christianity in recent years. The disciplines of mythopoesis and depth psychology have had an overlapping relationship through the years (see the work of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly), and while I’ve always been fascinated by them, I’ve never really explored in depth. Shaw propounds the necessity myth as something that claims us, rather than as a mere tool for analysis. I’ll be adding this latest volume to my pending reads list this year.

• Ron Rolheiser wrote about discerning our vocation over at his blog. He argues, along with C.S. Lewis, that vocation is something that comes from God’s compulsion, writing, “It’s the deep irrepressible moral sense we have inside that tells us what we must do rather than what we want to do.” I’m in a discernment cohort with some peers and church right now, where we try to trace the “threads” of God’s activity in our life through the years, principally by writing a spiritual autobiography. I will say for myself, that moments of discovering vocation usually come as a surprise, where there is no other obvious option. Optionality is something I prize in life, but when it comes to vocation, I would say that it’s fundamentally opposed to optionality.

• My friend Daniel gifted me a subscription to County Highway, and it is such a pleasure to read. For the unfamiliar, County Highway is not principally a web publication, but “America’s Only Newspaper”. I picked up a a copy years ago from First Light Books in Austin, read an essay by Aaron Gwyn waxing euphoric about Eddie Van Halen, and knew this periodical was something special. The reportage, essays, and reviews they publish transcend the ideological categories of things you would read in something like The Atlantic. If you’ve been looking for an arts and letters outlet that feels free, weird, and welcoming, this might be it.

• Over at X, Polimath opines over how frustrating it is to navigate technology as a parent, particularly now that Spotify has begun serving short-form video. This is yet another reason why I stand by my decision to use an MP3 player and start building my own music collection again. Choice abundance + slop + lack of ownership all go hand-in-hand.

• We are in the season of Lent, and at our Shrove Tuesday pancake supper + gumbo cookoff our priest reminded us that our attempts at self-improvement have the habit of reminding us how bad we are at it. This picture that Jenoa snapped when we were at Sonic the other day captures this truth well:

Have a blessed and holy Lent,

Robbie