Comfort Activism: When “Engagement” in Climbing Never Really Risks Anything

In the climbing world, “being engaged” is something you can now perform in a steady stream of Instagram stories and posts. But under that activist-looking gloss, there’s an uncomfortable question: when we say we’re committed, who’s actually taking a risk—and who’s settling for outrage that’s socially rewarding and professionally safe?

Kelowna / Canada (cc) Jeremy Vejgman on Unsplash

Some nights, scrolling social media, you get this weird sense you’re watching a separate competition—a quiet little contest where the goal isn’t to hold a razor crimp, but to prove, post by post, that you’re on the right side of things. The holds aren’t bolted to the wall anymore; they’re bolted to words: “safe,” “inclusive,” “committed,” “feminist,” “eco-friendly.” Everyone takes their moral burn (a try where you give it a real go), some more dramatic than others, some supposedly higher-stakes than others.

Except there’s a detail that starts to itch: in a lot of these cases, the risk is mostly rhetorical. Sure, you can “take a fall”—but it’s rarely the kind that breaks anything. Worst case, someone corrects you back, you lose a bit of standing in one circle, you eat a rough day in the comments. In other words: a cushioned fall.

Let’s call it what it is: comfort activism. A way to be “on the right side,” loudly and visibly, at a low real cost. The kind of commitment that picks fights where the ground stays solid and the consequences stay manageable.

What It Looks Like in Real Life

The scene is almost ordinary. That’s exactly why it’s worth sitting with.

It’s a climbing gym’s marketing campaign. The object of outrage? A poster that means well but botches something—an awkward phrase, a symbol, a word choice. Nothing scandalous, nothing involving victims, legal proceedings, or an actual power-abuse case. More like a misstep: debatable, fixable.

And the gym itself? It generally has a good reputation. It pays its setters (the folks who “set” routes and problems) decently. It’s not known for macho-brutal management. It tries, genuinely, to do better on accessibility, mixity, prevention, welcoming people in. This isn’t some cartoon tyrant-owner situation. Not the kind of club that protects a violent coach. Not an institution sweeping serious cases under the rug.

And yet: that’s where the lightning hits.

Suddenly it’s story after story. Public call-outs. Subtweets. Screenshots. The message is simple: it’s not enough—and, most of all, it’s not “aligned.”

Meanwhile, in the same ecosystem, everyone knows there are other stories. The ones that don’t fit into a story slide. The ones that involve power, and real blowback, and social cost. The ones where “speaking up” isn’t “correcting,” it’s putting yourself on the line.

How Comfort Activism Picks Its Targets

Comfort activism often works like this: it doesn’t start by asking, “Where is the worst harm?” It starts by asking, “Where can I hit hard without getting hurt?”

Targets get chosen the way you choose a boulder problem: you look first at the commitment it’s going to demand. If the target doesn’t have much ability to retaliate—if it’s already “one of the good ones,” and therefore has to respond carefully—then it’s game on. If, on the other hand, the target is actually powerful—real influence, real network, real ability to shut doors—then everything goes very quiet, very fast.

That dynamic is exactly what two American philosophers, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, describe as moral grandstanding. In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (2020), they lay out the moment when people use public moral language less to move an issue forward than to present themselves as especially virtuous.

Climbing—already a culture that knows how to stage performance—doesn’t escape that logic when it turns toward its own demons. The mechanism is straightforward: I post, I denounce, I correct. And yes, I can be sincerely attached to the cause—nobody has to be faking it for this to be true. But part of the motivation is also what that post says about me.

I’m not just a climber. I’m on the side of justice, safety, equality, ecology. I’m the person who “dares to say it.”

But “daring to say it” doesn’t mean the same thing when you’re saying it to someone who can actually hit back… versus someone who can’t. In a lot of cases, the ego is fully protected. You’re not risking your job. You’re not jeopardizing your spot on a team. You’re not blowing up a major contract. You’re not confronting someone genuinely intimidating. You get mad at the level your social circle can absorb. You look brave—so long as bravery doesn’t get expensive.

Low-Cost Outrage

This kind of activism loves the gray zones between supposed allies. It’s easier—and sometimes more flattering—to scold the person who agrees with 90% of the diagnosis but “messed up” the last 10% than to take on a system that denies everything outright.

It’s more comfortable to correct a visual than to support someone through a long, uncertain, exhausting process. More tempting to put a “mostly decent but imperfect” organization on trial than to go after the ones with real leverage: money, reputation, gatekeeping, hiring power, access.

In that framework, outrage becomes a low-risk act with a high symbolic payoff. It produces results immediately: reactions, applause, belonging, recognition. And that’s where Tosi and Warmke help again, because moral grandstanding is also a status economy—a way to convert moral posture into social capital.

The problem isn’t being visible. The problem is when visibility becomes the goal and actual impact becomes secondary—when the moral act is built to be seen, shared, praised, and above all, to not cost anything.

The Collateral Damage

This isn’t only a moral issue (“doing it for yourself more than for the cause”). It’s also political in the plain, practical sense: it reshapes the terrain. When you multiply low-stakes controversies that generate lots of noise, you get three ugly side effects.

First: mental overload. When every wording choice and every small organizational detail becomes a dramatic public dispute, it gets harder to tell the difference between fixable sloppiness and structural harm. From far enough away, it all starts to sound the same: an awkward sentence and an organization protecting serious misconduct end up on the same volume level.

Second: moral language gets cheaper. If everything is “unacceptable,” then nothing really is. If the same vocabulary is used to call out a clumsy design choice and to talk about assault, the words lose weight. Here again, moral grandstanding is a good lens: when you keep waving morality around like a trophy, you wear it out.

Third: it undercuts the people who take real risks. Calling out a violent coach, an abusive boss, an organization that covers for people—that isn’t decorative outrage. That’s accepting concrete losses: partners, clients, friends, sometimes your mental health. For those people, watching the word “courage” get claimed by safe, consequence-free call-outs can feel brutal.

Let’s be clear: the issue isn’t the causes themselves. Fighting sexist and sexual violence in climbing, looking honestly at power dynamics in gyms, taking the ecological stakes around crags seriously—those aren’t just legitimate. They’re necessary.

Critiquing certain postures doesn’t mean you’re joining the people who want everyone to shut up. What’s exhausting isn’t the fight. It’s the comfortable version of the fight—the tendency to turn serious causes into ego workouts, into spaces where you prove you’re “one of the good ones” without ever going where it costs.

Real Activism Means You Might Lose Something

You could reduce all this to “hypocrisy,” but that’s too easy. Most people caught up in comfort activism aren’t waking up thinking, How can I use a cause to polish my image? They really do care about justice, equality, respect. Some have lived through domination or violence themselves.

They’re also, like everyone, trying to balance what they believe with what they’re willing to risk.

That’s where the question gets interesting: when can you say you’re actually doing activism? In climbing, as elsewhere, the answer probably comes down to one simple thing: concrete risk.

Not the risk of a bad day in the comments—that’s background noise now. The risk of losing something tangible: a relationship, a contract, a role, an opportunity, a sense of safety. Real activism isn’t picking the most compliant target. It’s accepting that the person or organization you’re calling out can genuinely harm you—and doing it anyway, because staying silent would feel worse.

Sometimes it means turning down a deal. Writing an email you know could blow up. Sticking with someone all the way through a process that will drain everyone involved. Sitting down in an office where nobody asked you to be.

And that’s where moral grandstanding becomes a tool for clarity: if your public statement brings you a lot and costs you nothing—if it makes you look good and never puts you in a difficult spot—then you at least have to consider that it might be more about positioning than commitment.

Changing the Route

So what do we do with that in the small, vertical world of climbing?

Maybe it starts with a simple move: treat our activism with the same honesty we bring to training. Correcting a clumsy phrase, pushing a gym to adjust a visual, pointing out a bad turn of speech—call that what it is. It’s correction. It’s education. Sometimes it’s necessary cleanup. It can be healthy.

But it isn’t, by itself, bravery.

Supporting someone who speaks up. Standing up to toxic leadership. Refusing a sketchy partnership. Documenting structural patterns. Accepting that you might take real hits—that’s where real commitment begins. That’s not moral performance. That’s not just narrative.

At bottom, comfort activism forces a question that’s unpleasant but necessary: who is this kind of “engagement” actually for? Is it mostly for other people—the victims, the most exposed, the ones without access to the mic—or is it mainly a way to secure a role, a place, a comfortable identity?

We won’t change climbing culture with low-cost outrage. We’ll change it with people who sometimes commit without a clean exit, without applause, without instant payoff—and do it anyway.