Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, built an entire philosophical method around a single, vertiginous move: he would take any concept you were using as a tool for thinking and then demonstrate that the concept had no stable foundation of its own. Not to destroy it — but to reveal that a tool you treat as ground is actually a raft. The mental models you use in product work are identical in this respect. A prioritization rubric, a jobs-to-be-done frame, a north-star metric — each one was genuinely illuminating when you first adopted it, and that very illumination is what freezes it in place. You stop questioning it not when it fails, but precisely when it keeps working. Nagarjuna's term for this trap was svabhāva — the false assumption that something has inherent, self-sufficient existence independent of the context that generated it. The practical move isn't to abandon the model. It's to run what his commentators called a 'dependent origination audit': for each model you're currently using, ask what specific problem context gave it birth, and whether that context still holds. A model that forgets it was born from a context becomes dogma. One that remembers is still a tool.

For the mental model you've applied most automatically this quarter — what was the specific situation that first made it feel true, and is that situation still the one you're in?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (c. 150 CE), particularly his analysis of svabhāva (inherent self-existence) and dependent origination as applied to conceptual frameworks