The Ick – The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The moment always feels smaller than its consequences. A pause, a laugh pitched slightly too high, a glance held a second too long. It begins not as betrayal, but as texture—a grain against the smooth fabric of attraction. Then something shifts. The ordinary becomes unbearable. The scent of overripe fruit hangs in the air, ripe with implication.

Revulsion is often mistaken for rejection, but its texture is more intimate than dismissive. It arises not from distance, but proximity. The ick does not emerge in the abstract; it arrives during closeness—often unbearable closeness—when another person becomes too real, too visible. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of mauvaise foi captures this well: we do not recoil from lies, but from the collapse of the stories we tell ourselves to make others bearable.

There is something cruel in the timing. What once made the heart quicken now causes the stomach to turn. The exact sound of their voice, the rhythm of their gait, the curve of a smile once adored—these things remain unchanged. But perception ruptures. Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that to love is to will the freedom of another collapses under the weight of performance. Freedom is romantic until someone exercises it in a way that disturbs our narrative. We say we want realness. We do not.

The body knows first. It flinches before the mind forms reason. A blink, a swallow, an errant breath—then the recoil. It is not a choice. It is not malice. The scent of overripe fruit again, uninvited, lingering. We want authenticity, but only if it flatters our projections. We claim to desire truth, but punish the vulnerable for speaking plainly. What begins as intimacy ends in suffocation. What begins as attention ends in surveillance.

There is no cure for this. Not in apology, not in explanation. The ick defies repair because it isn’t caused by action but by awareness. Carl Jung once proposed that what we reject in others is what we deny in ourselves. Perhaps the ick is not about them at all. Perhaps it is the sudden emergence of our own shadows, reflected in the other’s unguarded laughter or clumsy earnestness. Maybe that’s what we recoil from: our own need, made visible in someone else’s eyes. Or maybe maybe we are simply cruel, and the whole pursuit of connection is camouflage for a deeper instinct to flee before being seen. Maybe.

The overripe fruit again, its scent folded into memory. It’s just a smell. It’s just a presence.

It’s just a sound. A mispronounced word, an uneven tone, the sound of cutlery clinking too loudly. Light spills over the surface of a water glass. Breath against skin. A flutter in the chest.  The temperature of the room. The way their fingers twitch as they speak. The humidity clinging to the back of the neck. A door closes.

We expect too much. We continue to demand that others be natural but not awkward, confident but not arrogant, honest but never raw, polished but still spontaneous, attractive but never trying, intuitive without intrusion, available without expectation, familiar without being boring, and new without being strange. And when they fail to meet this impossible standard, we label it the ick, and pretend we are simply responding to something they’ve done.

But the ick doesn’t signal their change. It signals ours. Or maybe no one changed at all, and what shifted was simply the atmosphere—the lens through which we choose to view them. It ends with a question: what is the cost of truly seeing another? And do we ever really want to?

 

Media

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir – A profound meditation on freedom, responsibility, and the limits of perception.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – A chillingly funny account of withdrawal, self-perception, and emotional recoil.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – Love remembered, rewritten, and undone by memory and aversion.