Félix Ravaisson, a 19th-century French philosopher almost nobody in tech has heard of, built his entire career on a single observation: habit doesn't just automate behavior, it gradually relocates it. What begins as a conscious act — a deliberate choice, a reasoned judgment — slowly descends into the body, becoming something you do before you think. He called this 'the spiritual in matter.' The unsettling implication for mental models is that your most-used frameworks aren't tools you pick up and put down. They're postures. They've migrated out of your deliberate cognition and into your reflexes, which means they now operate below the level where scrutiny can reach them. The product manager who has used 'jobs-to-be-done' for four years doesn't apply the framework — they see through it, the way you see through a clean window rather than at it. That's the power and the trap: a framework that has become a posture filters reality before you've noticed reality has arrived. The practical discipline this suggests is strange but specific — periodically try to use the model badly on purpose, apply it somewhere it clearly doesn't fit, and notice the resistance you feel. That resistance is the framework's edges, made visible. You cannot inspect a lens you're using fluently; you can only inspect one you're struggling with.

What would someone observing your last roadmap discussion say you were optimizing for — and does that match what you'd claim you were optimizing for?

Drawing from French Spiritualist Philosophy / Ravaissonian Habit Theory — Félix Ravaisson (De l'habitude / Of Habit, 1838)