At the center of a great deal of economics stands a character who has never been seen in the wild: a person with stable preferences, perfect information, and the cold consistency to act on both. He is convenient, tractable, and entirely imaginary, and we have built much of the modern world on the assumption that he is us.
Real people are not irrational so much as differently rational. We are loss-averse, present-biased, exquisitely sensitive to how a thing is framed and who is watching. These are not bugs in the human; they are the human. The model is not describing us badly. It is describing someone else.
A theory whose central character is fiction will predict a world that does not arrive.
The fix is not to abandon models (we cannot think without them) but to remember they are maps, and to stay loyal to the territory when the two disagree. The map that insists the river is not there does not move the river.