DEATH DRIVE
“The aim of all life is death.” —Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
This week I found myself on Spotify, scouring the catalog of the late Townes Van Zandt (who would have turned 80 last month had he not succumbed to death-by-detox at age 52) looking for something all of us—at least according to Freud—are after.
Annihilation.
And Van Zandt is the embodiment of it.
Nobody laid waste to Self and boundless creative talent quite like Van Zandt.
Arguably the greatest American songwriter ever, this was a guy who was known to shoot rum and Coke intravenously. He also offered to sell the publishing rights to all the songs on his first four albums for twenty bucks to buy heroin.
While he sang about waiting around to die, Van Zandt didn’t. He chased death. And sadly, captured it. The melancholy and music he left behind invites us to die, just a little, vicariously, along with him.
There’s a misconception that addicts of the Van Zandt type live like they are never going to die. Far from it. They live like they are definitely going to die. And they often do. They ride the rails alongside Death, drinking and drugging with it, getting high on the proximity to it. It’s a romance so beguiling. And the higher the stakes, the bigger the thrill. The more tension between life and death, the sweeter that release.
This is the same tension at the foundation of great art.
And it’s the same tension you might find in every living thing.
The tension between two poles—one fighting to survive another craving release—has been going on here on Earth for about 3.7 billion years.
As Freud writes, “The inanimate was there before the animate…the tension then aroused in the previously inanimate matter strove to attain an equilibrium; the first instinct was present, that to return to lifelessness.”
The manifestation of that instinct in us (the death drive, or Thanatos) presents as what Jacques Lacan called “a nostalgia for a lost harmony.”
We long for some blissed out moment before the tension between life and death ever existed. We long to return.
And the addict seems to long harder.
Today, in some ways, it’s too easy to survive.
The likelihood that you or I won’t get through the next 24 hours is probably lower than it’s ever been. My Volvo has seven airbags. Violent crime is down in Los Angeles. And I don’t have polio. My grandpa had it. Twice.
The fact that three out of four young people aren’t “fit to serve” in the military doesn’t hinder our strategic deterrence. Drone warfare and precision-guided remote weaponry make it possible to fight wars without pulling our young people away from their Fortnite and “fourth meal.”
We are sick. Yet we survive.
Silicon Valley has produced ever more addictive ways to briefly quell the discomfort of living with always-on on-demand dating, gambling, pornography, outrage, that takes us fractionally closer to some kind of demise.
But in the absence of real threats, we find ourselves creating false ones. As the Succession meme goes, “I feel like if I don’t get to do this, I feel like that’s it. Like, I might die.” We fill up on cortisol, suffering every little extinction that isn’t actually coming. There is no “if…then,” Kendall. There’s just “then.” Don’t get distracted.
The real professionals get that, of course. They go to lengths even greater than Van Zandt’s to brush up against death. See: in vogue substances fentanyl and flesh-rotting xylazine.
And we need not underestimate old reliable alcohol’s power to annihilate.
According to the CDC, alcohol related deaths in the United States increased 29% in the last five years. Deaths from alcohol-specific causes in the United Kingdom are almost 33% higher than they were before the pandemic.
Those seeking that intoxicating return to nowhere, to nothing, are getting massacred out there.
The blessed ones seek out healthier ways to die in life. “Relieve me of the bondage of self.” What is that if not a kind of call for oblivion? In sobriety, we strive to starve the false self of every lie it needs to survive. In that ultimate act of defiance—surrender—we dare to find more life than we ever found dodging death. We don’t seek out substances to make that life-death tension bearable. We accept it. We embrace it. And on its razor edge we find a fourth dimension.
This is also the promise of a really good meditation practice, a cessation of suffering linked to the temporary interruption of Self and its incessant wants. In the Tibetan tradition, “complete knowledge” can be something only attained at death or at the literal liberation of the consciousness from its human form. In Dzogchen, in death’s best case scenario, they escape delusion, burst into rainbow light, and leave only their hair, fingernails, and toenails behind.
Life itself is a partial suicide. It’s the death of death. And despite there being only one possible outcome, it’s still a gamble.
Oblivion and oneness are two sides of the same coin.
Heads you die.
Tails you die.
It’s how you toss that coin that actually means something.
Good luck.