“I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Let's say you notice that everything's getting more expensive. The trip to the grocery store costs more now and your streaming services have been increasing their prices. Everyone is saying inflation is here to stay. You decide to figure out why this is happening and what you can do to protect your savings. There are many explanations out there about how bonds and interest rates work, but it's all so confusing.
Your feed keeps recommending this podcast interview with a prominent investor and you finally watch it. He says buying gold is the answer and that it makes up a decent chunk of his portfolio. His explanations make a lot of sense and you feel some relief. Your chat group has recently gotten excited about gold as well, so you finally pull the trigger and buy a sizable amount.
The price goes up steadily over the next few months, seeming to validate your plan. But then the price plunges 20% in a couple of days. You don't understand what's going on, panic and sell your holdings. You thought you knew how to protect your savings. Now you're unsure about both the plan and your own judgement. After coming to terms with the loss, you start the search again for good frameworks and insights to make a new plan. As you scroll through blog posts and podcasts, you feel anxious and tired again.
Not knowing what's going on can be exhausting. Your mind hates the mental effort of keeping several competing possibilities open and wants the tiredness and cognitive load to go away. When you can borrow an explanation that makes everything click, the exhaustion goes away and you get to relax again.
The borrowed explanation is first and foremost a painkiller. The change in your mental state comes before any change in your situation. Ideally, the mental model also helps solve the problem, but the relief itself is not evidence that it will. An explanation changes how you feel regardless of whether that feeling is justified. If the borrowed model is wrong and you get a disappointing result you can't explain, the uncertainty comes back. You reach for another explanation and go through another round of anxiety and relief. It's easy to mistake the cycles of relief for evidence that you're climbing a ladder of progress towards your outcome.
If you want to get better, what you really need is a useful explanation: one that accounts for the messy context-specific details and doesn't avoid talking about the uncontrollable bits that can make the plan fail. But all this detail and uncertainty can be uncomfortable to take in. Learning something useful might initially make you less sure that you understand what's going on. Explanations that are coherent and sticky (like a yellow one described here) are soothing because everything fits together neatly. But they get that neat fit by leaving out a lot of what you'd need to know to make them work. The only way to tell whether you've been consuming useful models or yellow stories is by checking whether they're getting you closer to where you're trying to go.
When painkillers are readily available, you might put off checking whether you're getting anything beyond pain relief. Auditing an explanation in the real world takes work, and the results can be confusing or discouraging. Taking another painkiller gives you relief almost immediately. You tell yourself that you need to understand a little more before you're ready to act, so you open another article or listen to another podcast. These yellow painkillers are like opiates that provide enough relief to keep you at the screen. You can spend all your time collecting explanations and feel like your understanding is getting better, while the problem that sent you looking for them remains untouched.
It's particularly easy to get addicted to painkillers in the modern media environment. We demand immediate relief from the tiredness of not knowing what happens next. A market is created for explanations that provide that relief. Some authors are genuinely trying to help you get better, but many publishers benefit when you keep coming back for another dose. Sellers have an incentive to produce stories and explanations that make the audience feel certain now, long before anyone finds out if the model actually works. The marketplace pushes for repeat consumption rather than recovery.
The most stubborn painkillers are the ones that can't be meaningfully tested. These are particularly common in domains that have a lot more spectators than participants, like business and politics. You might read a convincing account of why a company failed and come away certain that the founders couldn't delegate. But if you're only watching from the outside, you don't get to change those decisions and see what happens. The fact that the company failed doesn't by itself validate the explanation, since many different explanations can fit the same outcome.
You can keep consuming these stories and feel increasingly sure that you understand how companies work, without learning which parts of your understanding need to change. It can take a long time to purge these opiates from your head, and in the meantime, they still affect who you trust, whose advice you repeat and who you vote for.
None of this means that we should avoid borrowed explanations. We can only make sense of the world through models, and most of the ones we use began in somebody else's head. A good explanation can carry lessons that might have taken years to learn and save you from making the same expensive mistakes. You don't need to blow up your savings to learn that you shouldn't buy gold when everyone is euphoric about it. But borrowing an explanation is just the first step in the journey of making it useful. Knowing the word for something doesn't mean you know the thing.
Even the best explanation can have gaps that the author filled in without realizing it, based on what works for them. You still need to try it yourself and adjust the parts that don't fit your situation before you can tell if it's useful for you in particular. In this way, a good painkiller is the raw material you can use to build a version of the model that works for you. These explanations are like your own antibodies, earned from repeated exposure to the real world and custom-built for your particular environment. To earn antibodies, you first need to know what you're trying to achieve so you can keep checking whether you're getting closer.
Still, even with a clear idea of where you want to go, testing models can be confusing. Real-world outcomes have many hidden factors. A wrong explanation can temporarily produce a compelling outcome because uncontrollable or hidden high-order factors align in your favor. A useful model can temporarily look wrong because those same factors work against you. If hidden factors that dominate the outcome keep changing, the results might never tell you which explanation to keep. Untangling the cause and effect here involves grappling with all that doubt and uncertainty again, exactly what you were trying to avoid with the painkiller in the first place.
Herein lies the other critical way painkillers can help. The false certainty they provide can make you just foolhardy enough to enter the arena where reality can slap your models around and sharpen them. Without that confidence, you might just stay a spectator.
No matter how good you feel, though, don't bet so much that you can't keep going if the explanation is wrong. The painkiller can get you into the arena, but it shouldn't determine how much you risk there. Getting a model wrong should never be able to wipe out your savings. To earn antibodies, you'll first need to survive and then have the persistence to enter the arena again and again.
There's more than money at stake, though. If your identity and self-image are underwritten by a painkiller before it's verified, your brain will start blocking evidence showing you how it might be wrong. Antibodies can only form if you're able to let go and swap out your models when reality tells you to. Keeping the stakes manageable gives you room to keep a loose grip on borrowed models while you find out whether they work.
As you build antibodies and get enduring relief from a core set of explanations that work, you want to build your tolerance for uncertainty as well. Practice taming the urge to form another opinion when no useful feedback loop is available. This helps you focus your time and energy on properly validating the few strong opinions that you're actually planning to use, rather than overdosing on opiates that will never be tested.
Painkillers can help get you outcomes, but only if you know what they do to you and how to use them. Never take more than you need, and channel the illusion of certainty they provide to enter the arena to earn your own antibodies. Most importantly, don't get stuck at the screen getting addicted to podcasts just for the pain relief.
Postscript: This note is itself just a painkiller. It gives you new vocabulary to work with, but building an antibody from it still takes a lot of effort. You can tell it's working only when you actually spend less time reaching for new models for relief. If the painkiller to antibody conversion isn't happening, some higher-order bit in your context could be blocking it. A one-on-one chat, like a mirror session, might help you figure out what's missing. This note is meant to give you some shared language to get that conversation started.