This past week, as the world turned its attention to the Titan submersible that disappeared last Sunday during a dive to history’s most famous shipwreck, it was reported that OceanGate’s chief executive, who was piloting the vessel, was married to a woman who is the great-great granddaughter of Isadore and Ida Straus, two of the wealthiest people aboard Titanic during its ill-fated voyage in 1912. Records show that Isadore, a co-owner of Macy’s department store, paid about $103,000 in today’s currency for his first-class stateroom–a fraction of the $250,000 ticket price for a seat aboard Titan.

The Strauses are perhaps best known for their tragic love story. Survivors of the disaster recalled seeing Isadore refuse a seat on a lifeboat when women and children were still waiting to flee the sinking liner. Ida, his wife of four decades, declared that she would not leave her husband, and the two were seen standing arm in arm on Titanic’s deck as the ship went down.

Much has been written in the past week about the five men who perished when Titan imploded during its descent to Titanic, particularly Stockton Rush, who created the vessel.

James Cameron, director of the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” and a longtime member of the deep diving community who has himself ventured down to the wreck 33 times, said he was struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet steamed ahead at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, with many people dying as a result.

“It’s a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded,” he added. “To take place at the same site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”

The two disasters are now eerie bookends that will go down in history as cautionary tales of human hubris.

Beyond that, however, is the complex reality that, while the world’s media and its governments devoted enormous resources to a handful of wealthy experience-seekers, hundreds of migrants lost off the coast of Greece just a few days earlier remained unaccounted for.

There’s a reason many people struggle to understand why wealthy folk participate in extreme, death-defying experiences, and pay (often lots of money) to experience what amounts to smallness and powerlessness. It’s a romanticism of peril, of death, as a way to appreciate life — in other words, a privilege. For the poor and the marginalized, the threat of social obsolescence and powerlessness is a lived, everyday reality. There’s no need to pay for the thrill.

Of course, we sympathize with the families of those who perished in Titan. But we wonder, what was the social value of their adventure? What was so globally important about their plight that teams from multiple countries were dispatched to try and rescue them, while migrants — who are arguably much braver but have far fewer resources — were demonized and left to die, despite the fact that all they wanted was the opportunity to have a better life?

These issues weighed on us as we processed the week’s events and engaged in our typical weekend activities. One thing was clear: water, like earth, wind, and fire, is elemental. Like death itself, it’s one of the great equalizers. It doesn’t care. It knows no difference between wealthy and poor; makes no distinction between those searching for a better life and those searching for a rare experience. Many attribute the difference in responses to the difference in people on both vessels. Among the victims and survivors of the capsized boat in Greece were migrants from Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Palestine. They were mostly women, and between 50 and 100 children. The five men killed on Titan included British billionaire Hamish Harding, prominent Pakistani Shahzada Dawood and his “terrified” teenage son Suleman, former French Navy captain and veteran deep-sea diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush.

The discrepancy between the resources and attention devoted to Titan versus the migrant boat near Greece is a tragedy in and of itself. But we lose a bit of our humanity when we become hardhearted as a result. Human suffering cries out for compassion, not schadenfreude.