The Ick

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

A philosophical reflection on repulsion, perception, and the fragility of intimacy.

The moment always feels smaller than its consequences. A glance too long. A laugh pitched just above comfort. A scent of overripe fruit. The ick doesn’t begin as betrayal—it arrives as texture. It is the grain against attraction, the shiver in familiarity. It arises not from distance, but from unbearable closeness. The body knows before the mind forms meaning.

We engage Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of mauvaise foi—bad faith—as a collapse of the narratives we tell ourselves to make others bearable. The ick doesn’t arise from deceit, but from the crumbling of our carefully curated illusions. Simone de Beauvoir reminds us that love, at its core, is the will to see another as free. But freedom, when misaligned with our expectations, becomes frightening.

Carl Jung proposed that what we reject in others is what we deny in ourselves. The ick, then, may not be about them at all. It may be the sudden emergence of our own shadow—reflected in the clumsy earnestness or too-honest laughter of someone who no longer flatters our story. Perhaps this is not judgment, but self-recognition made intolerable. Or perhaps we are simply cruel—and intimacy is camouflage for a deeper instinct: to flee before being seen.

What begins as closeness ends in surveillance. What begins as attention ends in suffocation. A mispronounced word. A clink of cutlery. The angle of a smile. A breath too fast. The room’s humidity. A door closes. Nothing changed. But we did.

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What is the cost of truly seeing another? And when the veil lifts, do we really desire to?

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