Everytime I pass a homeless person who is begging me for money, i feel a certain kind of discomfort, not the usual one but it runs deeper. From an evolutionary lens, humans are wired to react strongly to visible signs of disease or decay, smells, dirt, mess as a protective mechanism. But in modern life, that biological trigger blends with social judgment. So now, disgust isn’t just physical, it’s moral. We look at someone who's unclean and think not just “that smells bad,” but “that’s wrong,” or “they've failed somehow.”

But this is conditioning, not truth. Homeless people especially those in visible suffering represent what we’re most afraid of becoming: Alone. Excluded. Unwanted. They are proof that you can fall through the cracks. That life can unravel. That fear manifests as disgust because it's easier to reject than to empathize. We look at them and subconsciously think: "That could be me. That still might be me." And that thought terrifies us.

So the mind does a trick: it distances. It turns fear into contempt. Empathy into irritation. Disgust is the shortcut out of uncomfortable self-reflection. Some people don’t just feel discomfort. They feel hatred. A deep, irrational resentment toward the poor. Not because the poor have wronged them but because, in them, they see a version of themselves they’ve buried. A version they worked so hard to escape. A version they fear still lives somewhere deep inside. One wrong move. One missed opportunity. One tragedy and it could all vanish.

So instead of admitting that truth, they look away. Or worse, they look down. They shame. They ridicule. They dehumanize. Because if the poor are lazy, dirty, worthless, then maybe success was always deserved. And privilege? Earned. It’s easier to believe that lie than to sit with the truth:

The line between us and them is thinner than we think. Carl Jung once said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

And maybe that’s what this disgust really is, not judgment, but a mirror. One that reflects the parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore We don’t hate the poor because they are different. We fear them because they’re not.