“In the end, our conventions and our conceptual framework can never be justified by demonstrating their correspondence to an independent reality. Rather, [Nagarjuna] suggests, what counts as real depends precisely on our conventions.”
From Jay Garfield’s Introduction to Nagarjuna’s Wisdom of the Middle Way

What’s real? Generally, the currency of that knowledge is expressed in pointing to the essence of ourselves and things.

If we can’t find that essence, the “thingness” of what is real, then it isn’t real, it is empty. And there is not essence to emptiness.

We have to will our own reality into existence each day.