Creative Energy vs. Death Energy
Both forces are pulling at every moment. Both feel natural. The one you feed is the one that builds your life.
When I was 18, a philosophy teacher introduced a concept that stayed with me forever. He called them pulsions de vie and pulsions de mort: life drives and death drives. The idea comes from Freud, who argued that human beings carry two fundamental forces at all times, one pulling toward creation, growth, and expansion, and one pulling toward destruction, withdrawal, and dissolution.
At its most powerful, the life drive is what makes you fall in love and bring a child into the world. At its most powerful, the death drive is what makes someone pick up a weapon. Both are always present, both always competing, and both feel completely natural, which is what makes the whole thing so dangerous.
I started noticing it everywhere after that class. In the morning when I had the choice between starting something or going back to bed. In conversations where I could build someone up or tear them apart. In the tiny daily decisions that didn’t feel like decisions at all but were, every single one of them, a vote for one force or the other. Once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.
The two forces
Creative energy is life energy, the force that makes things exist that didn’t exist before. A business, a piece of writing, a relationship, a conversation that shifts how someone sees the world. It doesn’t require scale or ambition to be real. The common thread is expansion: something is more after you’ve touched it than it was before.
Death energy is equally powerful and equally available. It’s the pull toward contraction, tearing down, withdrawing, going small. Here is the part that took me years to understand: death energy rarely looks destructive in the moment. It looks like scrolling for three hours instead of working on the thing you said mattered. It looks like obsessing over a competitor’s launch instead of finishing your own. It looks like reworking the same page for the sixth time because shipping it means being seen, and being seen means being judged, and staying invisible feels safer. What it’s actually doing is shrinking your world one small contraction at a time.
Both voices are real and instinctual. The pull toward destruction doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as a reasonable thought: this isn’t good enough yet, who are you to do this, look at what she’s doing, maybe you should wait. Creative energy has a different texture. It doesn’t argue. It says make the thing.
Where this gets real for women building something
Building a business is one of the purest expressions of creative energy there is. You are choosing to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before, and every day you’re building, both forces are pulling.
The creative pull says keep going, make the next thing, put it out there. The death pull says compare yourself, go back to what was safe, she’s already doing it better. Building as a woman is hard for a million different reasons, and every single one of those reasons is an invitation to let the death pull win.
When you’re in flow state, creative energy is effortless. You’re building, the work feels natural, the hours disappear and something real exists at the end of them. The problem is that you’re not always in flow state. Some days the pull toward destruction is stronger: the scrolling, the comparing, the tearing apart what you made yesterday, the convincing yourself it isn’t good enough. On those days, creative energy becomes a conscious choice rather than a natural state. A conscious decision to build instead of contract, even when contraction feels like the more natural option. That choice, made over and over in the moments where it’s hardest, is what builds a business you truly love, and your dream life.
Sara Blakely spent a year developing Spanx in secret, telling nobody, not even her family, because she knew people would try to talk her out of it. She was protecting creative energy from other people’s doubt before the thing was strong enough to survive it. With $5,000 in savings and no connections in the hosiery industry, every opinion she invited in carried the weight of someone who might be right, so she kept the door closed until the creative force had enough momentum to become a product that Neiman Marcus would say yes to on the first pitch.
The choice is smaller than you think
This decision gets made hundreds of times a day, in moments so small you barely register them. The moment you open Instagram instead of your draft. The moment you rewrite an email for the tenth time instead of sending it. The moment you abandon a project that was working because something newer appeared and made your thing feel small. None of those feel like choosing death energy. They all are.
The reverse holds. Every time you sit down and make something, even when the result is rough and imperfect and not what you pictured, that’s choosing life. Every time you ship before it’s ready, that’s expansion. Every time you feel the pull toward tearing something down and redirect it toward building instead, you are making the most important decision a founder makes, and most people never realize they’re making it.
Every case study on this site is ultimately the story of a woman who chose creative energy long enough for something real to come out of it.
Sources
- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920. Origin of the life drive (Eros) and death drive (Thanatos) framework.
- Epoché Magazine, “Eros and Thanatos: Freud’s Two Fundamental Drives”. Overview of the two drives and how they operate in daily life.
- Fortune, “Spanx’s founder kept the company secret for a year,” September 2025. Blakely on keeping Spanx secret to protect the idea from outside doubt.
- Stanford GSB, “Sara Blakely: Start Small, Think Big, Scale Fast”. Blakely’s development timeline and $5,000 starting investment.