Last week the New York Times announced it would buy Wordle, the viral word-guessing game in which you’re given six chances to guess a five-letter word. Josh Wardle, who created the game whose name is a pun after his own, would be paid somewhere “in the low seven figures,” according to the news, for the rights to his creation.

Like millions of others, Wordle has become a staple in my morning routine. I usually wait to have a couple cups of coffee before opening up the website to try my hand at guessing the day’s word. It’s not a particularly hard game, but it’s challenging enough to make you feel good about yourself when you inevitably succeed. Therein lies its broad appeal. I think three tries is peak experience, since one or two tries are unearned luck, while anything more than three tries feel as if you could’ve done better. Part of the game’s joy, in my estimation, is how little attention it demands. In a world in which technology, social media, and the outrage pornography that has come to pass for “journalism” competes for every waking minute of our attention and steals our capacity to focus on what’s important in life, Wordle asks no more than five minutes of your day. That everyone in the world awaits the same puzzle each day creates community and conversation. Some days it seems like my wife and I can pass each other like zombies in the hallways of our house as we mindlessly go about meeting deadlines and raising young kids, but we always talk about the day’s Wordle.

I found it interesting to see how many people were instinctively, reactively, and genuinely bummed to hear the news of this game’s purchase by the New York Times. “Well, that’s it! It’s over. Nothing good ever lasts!” seemed to be the median take. People even got mad at poor Mr. Wardle, accusing him of selling out. (For the record, I’m happy for him.)

“Selling out” is an interesting concept—or, rather, accusation—and one you tend to hear discharged within climbing discourse. Mr. Wardle created a great game that millions of people love—why shouldn’t he be compensated for his ingenuity? Of course he should. And what does it say about us and our culture that so many of us immediately assumed that an institution such as the New York Times wouldn’t be a great steward of the game—that because of their hegemonic power, the only possible outcome would be for them to ruin Wordle somehow?

Given how often corporations ruin shit, this reactive cynicism is probably warranted. But what, exactly, is it about “selling out” that causes people to feel such big emotions? Is it all projection and jealousy?

The topic of selling out came up on the new Enormocast, on which I made my annual appearance for the TAPS episode—the podcast’s saturnalia in which we list and debate various trends in climbing and determine whether they’re dead, dying, should die, or can’t be killed. Kalous brought up the topic of selling out, which led to a funny exchange in which we imagined Reinhold Messner in an Adidas track suit nested in his Italian castle. The debate wasn’t a litigation, per se, of selling out generally; instead, we debated the question whether selling out is something people even care about anymore.

The conclusion into which we stumbled in the clumsy, whisky-fueled way these podcast conversations tend to go was that, yes, “selling out” may have crossed the Rubicon into broad zero-shits-given agreement. And while it may be true that “selling out” as a critique feels passé, I think that we would nevertheless hold fast to the idea that there are better and worse ways to earn money within a climbing milieu. We might still use the term “selling out” to describe the behaviors of the latter.

It seems obvious, however, that selling out is one of those terms that will be deployed selectively and often unfairly against one’s enemies. But is it all just projection toward those you dislike who are successful? Or can accusations of “selling out” ever be a fair critique that isn’t sullied by cynicism, jealousy, or resentment?

Selling out may be one of those things—you know it when you see it. And I think there is something genuine and earnest to the emotional reaction many people have when they see it. They’re responding emotionally because they’re watching an important or favorable culture and tradition take a beating because someone else has justified their own personal short-term gains to themselves. I’m no anthropologist, but I would guess that this goes back to some deep atavistic instinct in which we want to keep harmony and order within the tribe. And those who only look out for themselves at the expense of the tribe’s wellbeing were probably flogged with banana branches.

Climbing, like many “lifestyle sports,” does have a cultural tradition in which it somehow feels wrong to climb for reasons other than a pure love of movement and adventure in the vertical realm. This is certainly one of the reasons climbing initially drew me in. It was a conscious rejection of the idea that one gets a job that turns into a career that one does for 40+ years in order to pay bills which never stop needing to be paid until you’re dead. After all, if money was important, I certainly wouldn’t have become a climbing writer.

But, of course, there’s the obvious hypocrisy that I make money within an industry built upon a lifestyle sport that proclaims to reject capitalistic values in favor of more spiritual ones. It’s an unhappy tension, to be sure, but I’m more or less at ease with this friction now that this website and my podcast are supported by readers and listeners who appreciate the value of the content and ideas I work to create. In a culture that’s becoming increasingly censorious, I view owning your own platform and finding your own audiences as utterly necessary precursors to free artistic expression.

It’s possible our traditional view of climbing as a spiritual, not commercial, sport was always just a myth—a delusion we’ve been telling ourselves based on stories about dirtbags who were secretly just trust funders. It’s also possible that this whole tension is just a fallacy—that our reasons for climbing can remain pure and unmolested by the pursuit of getting them paid for. But even if all of this is true—and I think it mostly is true—I think it would also be foolish to fully abandon the concept of selling out, even if it’s just a rainbow mirage fraught with bias and cynicism.

There’s something there worth preserving, something worth holding up as a north star as you evaluate your reasons for why you do this sport. It’s just not always clear what those reasons may be.