The Irk.
I hate the phrase “the ick.” I’ve hated it since it became a meme in our language, and I hate it for all the reasons you might expect. It is a term that is dismissive in the way that the popular kid in school might be dismissive. It centers the person who is getting “the ick,” and it is subordinating whoever is being or doing whatever thing––usually something ordinary, harmless and innocuous––that grosses that person out. It is such an entitled way to express yourself, presuming that your experience and reaction should be privileged, that your gut and its instincts are sacrosanct and unimpeachable.
I think of the famous passage in Tina Fey’s biography where she describes Jimmy Fallon having something like “the ick” in response to Amy Poehler doing some rawdy bit. When Jimmy Fallon said he didn’t like it, and that it wasn’t “ladylike,” Amy Poehler looked at him and said, “I don’t f***ing care if you like it!” That’s all you can do in the face of “the ick.” You can not care. You can dismiss as you are being dismissed. You can grab the ick-ed and tumble off a cliff of mutual disregard.
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I think this dynamic of ick-ed and ick-ing leading to this death-spiral of dismissal is at the root of a lot of our dysfunction. It’s such a checkmate situation, because the person who makes the first move just ensures the net-negative outcome for both people. I notice that this occurs regardless of ideological or political background. The ick can take the form of snotty comments among closed groups, elites, or in social media echo chambers of all stripes. It takes the form of cable news rage-baiting and the form of in-group, intelligentsia “takes.”
This phenomenon and how widespread it is does not give me “the ick.” It gives me “the irk.” “The irk” is defeatedness. “The irk” is wanting to give up. “The irk” is what you experience when you see these zero sum interactions happening in a way you are powerless to respond to. “The irk” is what you experience when people describe who they are mostly through a network of personal “icks.” “The irk” is what you experience when urgent needs for social and political connection and collaboration gives way to identitarian jockeying and navel-gazing. “The irk” is the sense of existential dread and discouragement that comes when you see a hulking, fascistic threat looming before you and look back and see that those who lack all conviction are also somehow full of passionate intensity.
“The irk” is not entitled. Just the opposite. “The irk” is something you catch when you feel like throwing in the towel on it all. “The irk” does not need to be expressed, even if it may come through our cracks from time to time. It has to be met in our own hearts. There is no resisting this world or its inertia. There is only the task of refusing––refusing the premise of “ick,” refusing the instinct to disregard others, refusing to give in to dimness and shadow. There is only the task of affirming––affirming the wholeness of people, affirming the dignity of their whole persons, affirming the undecidedness of outcomes and the lie of fated conclusions.
The only thing we can say to “the irk” is “I don’t f***ing care if you want to give up.”
