The Ick 2.0

Another week, another influencer who is all over my feed for all the wrong reasons. I'm not going to name him. You probably know who I mean. If you don't, it doesn't really matter, because this isn't a piece about him.

I'll say what I need to say about him and then I want to talk about something else that I think deserves more attention.

I've had the ick from this person for years. Like… Years. My gut said no long before it all caught up with him. This week my gut got receipts. It’s important that I say this, because I want to be very clear about something before the rest of this piece does its work: the ick was right, per usual. It was doing exactly what it was built to do.

Women have been refining these protective instincts for generations. So have people of color, queer folks, and anyone whose safety has ever depended on reading a room faster than the room could read them. The ick is not reactionary or unfair. It is a hard-earned, finely-tuned pattern-recognition system passed down across bodies, stories, and survived encounters. It is one of the most reliable tools we have.

I am not here to talk anyone out of their instincts. I am here to say: trust them… and.

That “and” is the part that is harder.

Person < Problem

The question I keep turning over this week is not whether this particular man is gross. He is. The question is why he was ever the main character. Kamber Peerboom (@meanoldersistertherapist) brought this up in a Reel yesterday and I immediately hit that repost button.

He is one of many voices in a field that is overwhelmingly made up of women, disproportionately held up by women of color and queer clinicians and therapists, most of whom have been doing the work for decades without the same reach. His follower count is not a reflection of his expertise. It is a reflection of who the algorithm elevates to sustain attention because his privilege allows him to say what he wants to say, no matter how problematic.

Attention is not expertise. It is just attention.

When we make the story about him, even in the process of taking him down, we are doing it again. Centering the white guy in a field he did not build, in a conversation he should not be leading, using the oxygen and the airtime that could have gone to the people who deserve it more.

So I am going to try not to do that.

What I Actually Want to Talk About

What is more interesting than him, is how hard it has become to tell the real from the performed, and what that is doing to the instincts we need most.

We are in a strange position. The ick, as I said, is reliable. It has been sharpened for millennia by people needing to know quickly who was safe and who was not. In person, in real time, it works. You meet someone, and your nervous system reads a hundred small signals before your conscious mind catches up: tone, eye contact, the way they treat the person who brought them water, the quality of the apology when they make a mistake.

Almost none of those signals survive the trip through a well-curated filter.

What comes through a Reel or a caption is a tiny, highly edited slice of a person, professionally lit, rehearsed, scripted, and now sometimes AI generated. The signals our instincts were trained to read are not there. What is there is the simulation of those signals. A warm tone but with a smile that doesn't reach the eyes. Speaking to a camera lens instead of a human face. A confession without vulnerability. An apology written by someone, or something, else.

And some people have gotten very good at mimicking the signals our instincts were built to trust.

Our instincts haven’t failed but the environment has changed faster than our instincts can recalibrate. We are running software that evolved for in vivo threat detection on an interface designed to overwhelm and confuse our senses.

So the ick needs to evolve.

And the Other Direction

Here is the part that made me want to lead with a caveat.

The same feed that filters out warning signs also filters out humanness. These platforms that let a predator polish their craft, also flatten a decent person's mistake into evidence of their whole character. We exist in an environment that tries to hide the ick when we need it, but also manufactures the ick when it is not actually there.

A genuine apology can read as performative. A good clinician who gets a take wrong has the full scope of their practice put on trial. The format collapses the difference between a moment and a pattern. Nuance isn’t a sharable product, but it’s also what humanness actually looks like.

When the penalty for getting something wrong in public becomes the risk of losing everything, people with the most interesting voices stop talking. The nuanced take doesn’t get made. Those who would have made the messier, more honest post take the safer route, or say nothing. What fills the vacuum is the sanitized version. The “6 tips for burnout” and pop psychology that offends no one but teaches nothing. We get worse content. And the quality of the conversation atrophies.

The escalation is inherited. It’s a reflex that makes sense. Our instincts were built to escalate quickly when a threat is detected, because within the environments in which they evolved, the cost of underreacting was catastrophic. That escalation reflex, which is exactly what keeps us safe in a room with an actual danger, can get hijacked online, where every perceived violation arrives with the same intensity signal. A clumsy sentence and an actual red flag can trigger the same nervous-system response when they are delivered through a 9:16 ratio with the same algorithmic urgency.

So the work is sharpening the ick while also widening it. Letting it evolve in both directions: keeping the sensitivity while gaining the discernment to recognize a human moment from a harmful pattern. We need to watch for the manipulator in the feed, while being mindful of the pile-on reflex in ourselves.

The Ick, Recalibrated

The ick evolved to catch harm. The feed evolved to catch engagement. When we confuse them, two things happen at once. Actual predators get harder to see, because they have learned to hide amongst the noise. And ordinary fallible people find it harder to survive, because every misstep now carries the risk of blowing up your life.

The Ick 2.0 could know the difference. It could hold its fire when someone has a bad moment to reserve it for the people with problematic patterns. It could give a real apology time to prove itself and not let a polished one buy that time on credit.

Getting there is ongoing work.

It looks like noticing when a pile-on has its own momentum separate from the thing that kicked it off, and asking whether we are still protecting ourselves or whether we have moved on to something else. It looks like letting an apology be awkward before deciding it is fake, and not letting a polished one buy trust it hasn't earned. It looks like letting a pattern prove itself, in either direction, before handing down the verdict.

That discernment is hard. It's supposed to be. It's what keeps our instincts from becoming the thing we were trying to protect ourselves against.