Yes indeed, mocking gravity while hurling yourself directly towards the enormous local source of it all is much more sane (said as someone who has done plenty of both)

You’re probably talking about proximity flying. I’ve done a bunch of wingsuit flying, in groups, from a plane. Skydiving but with wingsuits. With all of the correct training and gear, it felt completely safe.

I never BASE jumped, but when I was skydiving a lot I was considering giving it a go, but still leaning towards the ‘nah that’s probably a bit too dangerous for me’ side.

Then there’s base jumping with a wingsuit… Something that if I had gotten into base jumping, would still have probably been too scary.

Then, about 100x more dangerous and terrifying than all of that, is proximity flying - wingsuit base, with the intention of staying close to terrain the whole time. These psychos fly through valleys, between trees etc…

Knowing what I do about how tricky it is to fly a low-performance, gentle easy wingsuit in a stable formation, the idea of flying these bigger, twitchier high performance wingsuits through a valley just seems suicidal. Absolutely nope.

Riding my motorbike to work on a cold morning, I came up behind a car driving very very slowly through my residential area. I watched them slowly follow the road as it curved to the left, slowly keep turning left as the road straightened out, slowly drive up the curb and slowly hit a street light.

I pulled over to check on the driver as I was worried about it being a medical issue, but noticed they were already reversing. This made me think they might be drunk, so I moved a bit further away to put my bike behind a parked car, then went to check - by this time the driver was out of the car, not drunk or having any medical issues, just checking the car and then cleaning the windscreen. They had been too lazy to wait for the windscreen to de-mist a bit and had been trying to drive almost completely blind while wiping it with their hand…