Schopenhauer made a strange observation about boredom: it is not the absence of stimulation but the presence of a self suddenly visible to itself. Strip away the projects, the problems, the feeds, and what remains is the structure of your own wanting — exposed, with nowhere to hide. This is directly relevant to how mental models calcify. Models feel like tools until you're bored; boredom reveals they are also desires. The model you reach for first in a meeting, or when reading a competitor's move, is not neutral — it is a preference masquerading as perception. Schopenhauer called this the 'will' — the blind, directional drive that precedes reasoning and shapes what reasoning even notices. The practical discipline here isn't to get better models; it's to periodically create conditions — a long walk, a silent morning, a deliberately unscheduled hour — where your habitual models surface as feelings before they become thoughts. That's the moment you can actually examine them.

What would you have to want differently for your most-used mental model to stop feeling obvious?

Drawing from German Idealism / Voluntarist Philosophy — Arthur Schopenhauer