Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, spent his career doing something that looks almost perverse: systematically dismantling the conceptual tools people use to think clearly. Not to leave them in confusion, but to expose a specific failure mode — that the moment a concept becomes fluent, we stop noticing it as a concept and start treating it as furniture. The technical term is reification — mistaking an abstraction for a thing that exists independently of how you're framing it. The practical consequence in mental-model work isn't subtle: your most powerful models — the ones you reach for automatically, the ones that feel like 'just seeing clearly' — are precisely where Nagarjuna would look first. Not because they're wrong, but because fluency creates a kind of blindness. The model disappears into the territory. What Nagarjuna prescribed wasn't abandoning conceptual tools, but periodically running what he called 'prasanga' — a reductio move where you push a framework to its limits until it reveals the assumptions it requires to hold. Pick your most load-bearing mental model. Trace one assumption inside it that you've never actually tested — not because it's probably wrong, but because its invisibility is the whole problem.

What assumption inside your most-used mental model have you never actually stress-tested — and what would it take to break it?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna