Thinking About Pleasure While the World Is Falling Apart

Last night, I found myself on my couch, watching the sky turn shades of pink, orange and red, scrolling through headlines and IG posts I didn’t want to read, but knew all too well the gravitas of the news unfolding on my little device. My chest felt heavy (again) with grief for the world, for people I love, for futures that feel uncertain – even terrifying. And then, whilst sliding into the doomscroll, I giggled. A friend had sent a video earlier, and somehow, the tension in my shoulders loosened, my chest expanded and made a little more room for the tightness that has been mounting for months as I, like you, watch the world burn.

Guilt flared immediately. Maybe you feel this too. How can I feel pleasure right now, when everything is collapsing? But then I remembered Audre Lorde, and her insistence that the erotic—the deep, embodied knowledge of satisfaction and aliveness—is not a luxury, but a source of power.

Pleasure Isn’t Denial, It’s Sustenance

Lorde writes, “The erotic offers a well of creative energy, a resource within ourselves which can give us the power to scrutinize the world and our lives, and to act upon that knowledge.” Pleasure isn’t escapism. It isn’t ignoring suffering or pretending the world is fine. It is a way of connecting more fully with life, even amid crisis.

The erotic, she reminds us, is a measure of how deeply we refuse to settle. It is distinct from the pornographic, which she describes as a superficial use of sensation devoid of feeling or meaning. Real pleasure deepens perception, sharpens attention, and reconnects us with the world rather than allowing us to float above it.

Collapse Narrows, Pleasure Expands

When the world feels unmanageable, our nervous systems contract. We become hyper-focused on survival—on headlines, deadlines, and threats. The contraction protects us biologically, but it flattens the inner world, dulls empathy, and makes every moment feel uniformly dire.

Pleasure, experienced mindfully, counteracts this contraction. A taste of food, a burst of laughter, quiet touch, or the intimacy of sex or movement reminds us that life is not only to be survived but also felt. As Lorde puts it, the erotic “is the pursuit of satisfaction in a way that allows us to know ourselves as whole and alive.”

Pleasure as Political and Ethical

Historically, pleasure has always been policed—especially for women, queer people, Black and brown people, and those whose bodies were already denied power. Lorde understood that claiming erotic knowledge was inherently political: it meant refusing the logic of scarcity, control, and despair. She writes,

“We have been taught to mistrust our feelings, and to see our satisfaction as irrelevant, when in fact it is a source of power.”

Feeling pleasure while the world suffers is not a betrayal. It is an ethical act, a reclaiming of self, a refusal to let oppression or crisis colonize the body. It sustains our capacity to care, not diminishes it.

Pleasure Reconnects Us to What Matters

Crisis flattens meaning. Pleasure reminds us why loss matters, why justice matters, and why we fight, organize, and love. Experiencing joy anchors us to the stakes of life and clarifies what we are protecting.

Waiting for a “safe” moment to feel alive is a trap. Lorde’s work reminds us: the erotic is not deferred. It is a resource in the present, a compass for integrity, courage, and connection.

There Is No Moral Deadline for Joy

Sitting there, laughing at my friend’s video, I realized pleasure doesn’t contradict grief. It sharpens it. It reminds me I am alive and that aliveness matters. I can experience more than one sensation at a time. Lorde’s writing gives this permission: to inhabit desire fully, to feel joy, to claim erotic knowledge even—or especially—when the world is in turmoil. Pleasure, in her sense, is radical, ethical, and sustaining.