I practice one very risky sport.

It gives me a lot of adrenaline, and sometimes it costs me hours I didn't have, dignity I would like back, and at least one afternoon I was supposed to spend doing important things. The sport is engaging in the social media comments section.

Today, a dirty hand slapped me in the face.

The post was about a professional mountain biker who, during a competition, did a flip that makes you wonder whether humans were ever meant to have bicycles.

And he did not land it, and now he is paraplegic. It was hard to watch!

So I went to the comment section, and I wrote what I felt, something like: "Poor guy. It can't be easy being in a wheelchair, especially for someone whose life circles around being an adventure seeker, professional mountain biker." You see, I imagine that the life transition from being able to walk to no longer being able to must be hard as hell for anyone. But in his case, it also meant stripping away a huge part of his profession and, probably, his social circle. His identity was so deeply tied to those things that the adaptation must have been, if I may say so, especially brutal. And then there was the money side of it, too.

Then a man with a wheelchair profile photo arrived and replied to me:

"POOR GUY????? HE ASSUMED THE RISK."

I sat with that feeling for a while, then I did something I shouldn't have: I responded... I asked him what I was supposed to write instead: "That's what you get?"

That is where I want to start, because the reply was a genuine question, and I haven't stopped turning it over. I closed the app, grabbed my laptop, and went to a coffee shop to keep pondering it, revealing my priorities and maybe even something about the sport.

Well, he was right about the facts: the biker accepted the risk; he understood the sport could be dangerous. He picked the mountain, the speed, the flip, the adrenaline.

Somehow, the truth was used not to justify feeling sorry for him, but to accuse him.

That's the move I want to look at. Because the existence of risk had, in that comment thread, quietly become a reason to withhold compassion. And once you notice that move, you start seeing it everywhere.

The mechanic under the car

"All you have to do to die is be alive."

Yes, we assume risks constantly, and please don't focus too much on this. They are dull, ordinary, and quite realistic. Improbable, perhaps, but not for someone who actually died from it.

Imagine a mechanic who spends his days lying under cars. He knows vehicles are heavy and lifts can fail. If you asked him directly, he'd admit that being under several thousand pounds of metal is not a risk-free way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.

Then one day, somewhere around the globe, the car comes down, and the mechanic is crushed.

Nobody looks at that wreckage and simply says "He assumed the risk." 
We ask: "Where was the negligence?”

He assumed a risk; of course he did. He chose a profession in which working under cars is an occupational hazard.

He did not choose for the car to fall.

That is the core distinction, and we understand this perfectly when the background is a garage, but not the mountain.  Why? Why do people point a finger for one, but not for the other? Is it because the mechanic cannot do back flips with his vehicles?

The outcome is tragic in every case, with something terrible happening to someone; however, the verdict influences how much sympathy we are willing to offer.

  • If compassion is supposed to be unconditional, why do we run every victim through an imaginary scale?

innocent victim → maximum sympathy
careless victim → some sympathy
reckless victim → less sympathy
stupid victim → sometimes almost none, with "guilty" sprinkles on top

At the highest level, the innocent victim receives complete compassion, with no questions or evidence needed. For example, if a child is hit by a drunk driver on the sidewalk, it is considered a tragedy. Never think otherwise.

The careless victim gets most of it, minus a deduction for not paying attention. The cyclist who rode through the red light and was hit by a car. We notice the dumb thing they did, but ultimately, they get the compassion too.

The reckless victim divides people, because now society starts doing the math. The guy who rode his motorcycle at 3 a.m. without a helmet. We say it's terrible, and then add: but no helmet.

When an accident seems somewhat preventable, we might find ourselves attributing some responsibility to the person involved. Sometimes, there’s a gentle thought process at play: he took the risk, so he faced the result. I don't take that risk, so I believe the outcome is less likely to affect me. I wouldn't have done that.

It sounds like judgment, but sometimes judgment also makes danger feel more manageable. If his choice caused it and is one we'd never make, we can put distance between ourselves and what happened. The world feels a little less arbitrary, and we feel a little less vulnerable.

Although it's not always the case, we should recognize that people's judgments sometimes stem from this way of thinking.

The stupid victim gets almost nothing, with blame bordering on contempt. Often enough, society summons Sir Isaac Newton and invokes the ancient wisdom of action, well, reaction.

The man who climbed into the enclosure to pet the tiger.

What was he thinking? No, seriously.

Here, something changes. The victim's choice seems so absurd, so far outside anything we would consider doing, that sympathy gives way to another emotion: pure judgment. We don't necessarily feel less horror about what happened; instead, we process it differently.

Actually, a similar story happened in my country last year: a 19-year-old guy climbed into a lion enclosure at the zoo and was killed by the animal. Many people replied with 'What did he expect? It was a lion.' Millions judged him... millions! For days, for weeks! Until his family shared that he suffered from schizophrenia, and the government had failed to provide him with proper medical care, and he was probably hallucinating at the time. 

Notice what hasn’t changed: the action, the lion, the death. The only thing that has changed is what we know about the person who made the choice.

Do you still think he is the stupid victim?

See, things are never simple.

The compassion scale

I would argue that the compassion needle moves according to how strange the victim’s choice seems to us.

Think about most people's morning routine: waking up feeling a bit tired, pouring a warm cup of coffee, and heading out the door. Still groggy, you hold your coffee in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, occasionally thinking, "Let's check that notification at the next red light." You might even catch a quick glance at the GPS while slowly navigating through intersections. It’s a familiar, relatable start to the day! And you find yourself doing that again at the end of a busy day, often feeling tired and a bit overwhelmed by your work.

People don't call that risky. People call that commuting.

And they're right: statistically, they'll probably arrive fine. But somewhere beneath the routine, they know that driving while drowsy isn't harmless. Sleep deprivation can significantly impair attention, reaction time, and judgment. At 60 mph, even a one-second lapse in attention means traveling roughly 88 feet without processing what's happening around you.

We don't name that risk because naming it would make every morning a gamble. So we bury it under habit and call it life.

Here's an interesting part: we never judge the commuter. When we see a car accident, we don't just dismiss it by thinking, "Well, they chose to drive drowsy." Instead, we see it as a tragedy. We genuinely ask about the other driver, the road conditions, and the weather.

The mountain biker gets no such grace.

Now consider him.

He spends a thousand hours on trails, and his most common injuries are scrapes, bruises, and the occasional broken collarbone. The danger is real, but it's also specific: a loose rock, a misjudged landing, a split-second loss of focus. Those are the risks we see.
What we don't see is what actually takes riders down more often: the uphill grind, the exercise, the heart overload; the part where our doctor would call cardio.

The descent, seeming madness, kills fewer riders than their hearts do while pumping on the way up. We just don't film that part.

So let's be honest about what's actually happening on any given afternoon.

The mountain biker faces real danger: a loose rock, misjudgment, or bad landing could end his ride in a helicopter. A sedentary person on the couch faces a silent, invisible risk: a heart unused to activity, which could finally lead to an emergency.

One kills in an instant.
The other kills in installments.

Neither is imaginary, but we only call one a choice.

Now, let's address comments like, "What I like about this sport is that it's completely optional," while others say, "Being lazy has prevented me from many things."

And they are right! People can easily spend a whole lifetime without mountain biking, but they don't have the same option when commuting to work.

But you know what else is optional? The two hours of scrolling before bed instead of prioritizing sleep hygiene, taking the elevator instead of the stairs, snoozing the gym alarm, skipping the walk.

The difference in compassion is scale, visibility, and ordinarity.

The biker's choice is wide, visible, and strange. You can see him take it, film it, and get goosebumps on the flips from the safety of your screen.

The couch person's choices are small, invisible, and familiar: a thousand tiny forks in the road, each too routine to notice, too ordinary to judge.

But a thousand small choices add up to the same thing as one big one. They just take longer to arrive.

We call the active choice reckless because we can see it happening.
We call the passive drift normal because it happens to all of us.

Before anyone assumes I'm portraying disability as a tragedy: I am not. His life isn't over; paraplegia isn't a death sentence. He might discover new sports, new goals, and lead a life just as rich as before, and suggesting otherwise would be shallow pity.

I'm talking about the ordinary human thing called adaptation. When your body changes the terms without asking, there is a period of mourning for the life you thought was coming. This process deserves room, because it means becoming someone new under conditions you never chose.

This is heavy, and heavy things deserve compassion.

So, no, comments like "He assumed the risk; what did he expect?" will never be acceptable in situations like this, if they ever are.

And, as Gen Z would say: this is a hill I am willing to die on.

PS: As I was editing this essay, I realized I sound very angry. I'd like to call it passion... But, well, sometimes passion is just anger in a blazer.