The death instinct is often represented as if an obscure, metaphysical concept. People moan and groan as pretend this idea is so difficult to comprehend.  In actuality, the concept of the death instinct constitutes a simple idea.

The death instinct points to the (gradual) breakdown of the body, a process that that occurs within each and every organism (I was going to say "living organism," but that phrase would be redundant wouldn't it).

(Scroll down to see a photo of me when I was 17).

It's happening write now (right now) within each and every one of us. I once ran five miles in twenty-six minutes. Now, I'd be lucky if I can run one mile in twenty six minutes. This is a biological phenomenon. Nothing to do with how hard I train (although I know a fanatic fellow that I competed against in high school who wrote to me about a 50 mile race he was going to compete in. He was too old to perform this fantastic feat, and I warned him before the event. He did have a heart attack--beware of the fanatic denial of the death instinct).

What's more, the process of disintegration (the death instinct operating within our bodies) accelerates as we age. You can check the data on this. You lose 1% of your physical capacities per year, then 2%, etc. 

The death instinct is equivalent to the process of aging: the breakdown of our bodies. As we age, we grow weaker, less resilient, and more susceptible to disease.

People tend to think of death as what occurs after contracting a fatal disease, suggesting that if one did not become ill, one might live forever. The idea of the death instinct draws attention to the fact that our bodies are continually breaking down.

Of course, it’s extremely unpleasant to realize that we are moving toward our demise. So people take one of Freud's most fundamental--and simplest concepts--and pretend they don't understand it; too obscure to grasp. Repression of the death instinct, of course, is based on the denial of death.

Ernest Becker hypothesized (in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil) that the denial of death lies at the source of culture-building and of the creation of ideological systems. According to Becker, human beings attach desperately to symbolic systems that contain the promise or possibility of “living on” after one dies. The ego attaches to an ideology, equating self-perpetuation with perpetuation of the ideology with which it identifies. Human beings bind to “immortality systems” that they defend hysterically and violently.

Why is Koenigsberg telling us this? You don't have to read what I've just written. Crumple the piece of paper and throw it away if you wish. It's a free country. However, probably 90% of the horrible things that are happening in today's world revolve around the repression or denial of the death instinct.