The fact that the DEATH INSTINCT is operating within each of us means that each of us is in a gradual process of falling apart. This is what it means to grow older. We gradually fall apart. The death instinct refers to the structure of our cells. If you don't know that you are falling apart now, you will realize this soon enough. .

Freud’s concept of the death instinct points to the fact that, whatever symbols human beings may construct, organisms inevitably move toward their demise. Freud conceived of human existence as a struggle of “life against death,” observing that while organisms possess a life instinct that works to “preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units,” living creatures also possess a death instinct, an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.”

While the aim of the life instinct, Freud said, was is to establish “ever-greater unities and to preserve them thus,” to “bind together”—the aim of the death instinct is to “undo connections and so destroy things.” In the multicellular living organism, he wrote, the libido meets the death instinct that works to “disintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability.”

The life or sexual instincts active in each cell, Freud theorized, “take the (other) cells as their object.” They “partly neutralize the death instincts in these cells,” thus preserving their life. The life instinct, in short, acts to force or hold together “portions of living substance” within each organism, neutralizing that other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.” The life instinct thus prevents the organism from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability.”