Help! It's the end of the world... And I'm still horny!?

If you’ve found yourself doomscrolling headlines about war, rising hate, political chaos, and the general sense that everything in the whole world is on fire – only to be immediately interrupted by a very inconvenient wave of horniness – you are not broken. You are human.

There is something deeply confusing and somewhat unsettling about wanting connection, sex, flirtation, or intimacy while the world feels like it is absolutely unravelling. It can feel selfish. Tone-deaf. Even a little embarrassing – how can you be thinking about desire when people are suffering, democracy feels fragile, women’s reproductive rights are being decimated, and every news alert makes your stomach drop?

And yet, here you are. Still wanting. Still craving touch. Still imagining bodies and moments and closeness and…

This push-pull is more common than we like to admit. When the world feels unsafe or unstable, our nervous systems look for comfort, grounding, and relief. For many people, sex and intimacy do exactly that. They remind us that we are alive, embodied, and capable of pleasure even when everything else feels out of control.

Psychologists have long noted that desire does not disappear during crises. In fact, it often gets louder. Stress can heighten arousal for some people, not because they are ignoring reality, but because their bodies are trying to regulate it. Wanting sex during dark times is not a failure of empathy. It is a coping response.

The problem is not the desire itself – it is the guilt we layer on top of it. There is a persistent cultural idea that pleasure must be earned, or that it should be postponed until some unspecified time when the world is somehow “better.” The trouble is that the world is rarely better in neat, predictable ways. Waiting for a perfect moral moment to feel good can quietly turn into emotional starvation.

That doesn’t mean you have to force yourself into performative joy, or swipe mindlessly as a distraction. But it does mean giving yourself permission to acknowledge your wants without judgement.

One helpful shift is reframing desire as “maintenance” rather than “indulgence”. Intimacy can be restorative. Sex can be grounding. Even flirting can be a reminder that you are more than a passive observer of bad news! You are still a person with agency, appetite, and a body that feels things. Ask yourself what you actually need right now. Is it connection or release? Is it reassurance or novelty? Is it touch or simply to feel human? Those answers matter more than the label you put on the experience.

It also helps to set boundaries around consumption. Being informed does not require being constantly flooded. If your nervous system is fried, you are allowed to step back without disengaging from reality entirely. Pleasure does not erase your values. It can coexist with them.

When dating or hooking up during heavy times, clarity is kindness. Be upfront about your emotional bandwidth. Some people are looking for softness and care, while others want lightness without emotional labour. Neither is wrong, but mismatched expectations make everything feel worse. And if desire feels tangled up with grief, anger, or fear, that does not mean you are doing it wrong! Sex is not always escapist; sometimes it is how people process or how they stay afloat.

The world can be a mess, and you can still want to kiss someone. Both things can be true at the same time. Pleasure is not a betrayal of awareness! It is often what helps people keep going, keep caring, and keep showing up in ways that matter. If anything, wanting connection at the end of the world might be one of the most human responses there is. So if you're horny, tired, worried, and still trying to live your life in this hellscape, you're not alone. You are just navigating being a real live human being at a very strange moment in history.