There’s a groundhog on a burning beach in the image at the top of this post. He’s got sunglasses on, a cocktail in his hand, flames licking at his feet, and a sign that reads: No Work. No Worries. Just Sunshine.

He’s fine. Everything’s fine.

I made that image to say something about climate denial, but the more I sat with it the more I realized it’s not really about climate at all. It’s about something much more fundamental — the way human minds handle unwelcome knowledge.

We tend to call denial stupidity, or willful ignorance, or bad faith. Sometimes it is, but mostly I think we’re misreading what’s actually happening.

Changing what you know is hard work. Not metaphorically hard — genuinely, physically effortful. When new information arrives that contradicts something you’ve depended on, you can’t just swap it out like updating an App. You have to stop. You have to listen, really listen, probably more than once. You have to process it until the new model starts to overwrite the old one. That takes energy. Real energy. And for a lot of people, that energy isn’t spare.

In that sense we’re not so different from an LLM being retrained on new data. It takes compute. It takes time. The system has to do actual work to update its model of the world. We like to think human understanding is more elegant than that, but I’m not sure it is.

And that’s only the first cost.

The second cost is harder. Once you accept the new knowledge, you have to live in a different world than the one you thought you were in. Everything you built your understanding on — your sense of how things work, your place in it, your decisions that seemed reasonable at the time — all of it shifts. That’s genuinely disorienting. It takes courage to sit with that feeling rather than push it away.

Think about what it meant to accept that the earth orbits the sun. Not just intellectually — but really accept it, in a world where everything you’d been taught, everything the authority around you insisted on, said the opposite. It wasn’t that people were stupid. It was that the cost of updating was enormous. Social, psychological, existential. Heretical, in the most literal sense.

Denial, then, isn’t really a failure of intelligence. It’s the path of least resistance when the cost of updating feels higher than the cost of staying put. Psychologically rational in the short term. Catastrophically wrong in the long term.

The groundhog knows, on some level. That’s why he needs the sunglasses.

This blog is written with the assistance of Claude. That’s not a footnote — it’s rather the point.