This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

As I did when I attended meetings of the 12-step fellowships—and if you’re wondering which ones, the answer is: all of them—it’s necessary, in order to share what follows, to offer my own qualification for the task.

I think you, dear fucked-up reader, need my shining example of self-destruction, so that your own––quite likely feeble––attempts cohere. My worry is that otherwise what follows will be treated as an amusing listicle, rather than a genuine plan for action. Nominative determinism is, pretty obviously, my USP here. What’s more, I shortened my given name myself. So when I first began reading philosophy and psychology, thereby becoming, as it were, formally acquainted with myself in reflexive form; and then, a few short, self-destructive years later, when I was––pretty obviously––in rehab, and encountered the idea of “self-will run riot,” I knew they had me nailed. I’m your man—or possibly woman, or non-binary, given that the most strikingly unique physical characteristic of the male human is also its most evanescent. You might almost say the penile erection itself is the very instantiation of self-destruction. As to who “they” are, we’ll return to it anon, when you’re feeling suitably queasy.

Bodily Self-Destruction

The obvious route is suicide, although most prefer to do it slowly, through food and exercise, in inverse correlation. Certain chemical compounds, however, produce the same effect more quickly and more reliably. I favor speed, personally—velocity being the defining quality of our era. Nothing beats pastimes involving high velocity and a metabolism revved to breaking point. You might consider a combination of methamphetamine and Formula One motor racing, or, for a more subfusc version, poor-quality cocaine and go-karting. Personally, I’ve been known to stumble then fall, ambling to the ashtray, although also to drive from London to Oxford (46 miles) in 26 minutes in a turbo-charged sports coupé horning white lines off the dash fatter than the ones disappearing under the bumper.

That said, almost any pairing of intoxicant and velocity will suffice. Period pills and a garden tractor have been known to do the job. Even going nowhere in a K-hole can manage it. Nevertheless, stimulants and speed bring us closest, in their accenting of intense feeling, to the purely ephemeral—as with the failed erection, which obviously you already need to be reminded about. After all, it represents the high-velocity self-destruction of any one’s self-esteem who identifies too strongly as binary. Consider the Malaysian psychotic conditon latah, in which the victim believes malign spirits are causing his penis to invert and fuck his own body. Then reconsider it––in philosophy, we call this “reflection”––once you’ve taken… Ooh, I dunno, my speeding days were over by the early 1980s when Mama Coca sashayed in, bringing a deathly-cold draft with her. The accelerants I remember syncopating my teenage heartbeat so it felt as if rim-shots were being rapped out on my ribcage were quite different to those taken in later eras, let alone to the modish Ritalins and smart drugs of the current moment. Nonetheless: there were black bombers––the Rolls-Royce ride to penile dysfunction in my younger years. Time-release amphetamine that would keep you on the ceiling, vibrating, for 12 hours, especially if you dropped them together with a red microdot, and a Mogadon: the sleeper takes you under, then you come up… in colors.

As you do, reflect once more, on your anxiety that your penis may disappear inside your body. Or if you don’t have a penis, your clitoris may elongate and become a penis. I rest my case. 

Violent Self-Destruction

I have to cede territory here, which pains me, because my instinct is always to go mano a mano with anyone who tries to encroach on my patch. But here’s the problem: In my neck of the woods, you don’t go to see an armorer, get a strap, and go tooled unless you want to be taken out by the Met’s Finest. I was once summoned to the office of the then-Commissioner for grassing up some of the Met’s Finest for, how can I put it, shooting someone in cold blood. His point was that I should be grateful—and, for the most part, I am. In my experience, the quickest way of getting dead is to get shot, and the quickest way of getting shot is to either shoot yourself or at armed police. Gun crime in the UK is very low, so I can’t claim the annihilatory familiarity that even the averagely interested American has with this particular mode of self-destruction. Also, I’m a lousy shot—dominant left eye, right-handed, bad strabismus—so beyond target shooting, forget it.

Nevertheless, I’ve been around plenty of violent people, being myself inherently and violently self-destructive. I’ve known more than a few high-profile “chaps”—London arcana for armed robbers—“pavement artists,” “blaggers,” “wheelmen,” chaps who do indeed go to the armorer for a strap and then go tooled. I remember one night being driven through London to score an eightball by a mate who’d once been a bit of a “face” himself and was now doing a favor for an old associate: “You don’t mind if we take this geezer and his boy with us,” he said. They got in, and both had faces out of some grotesque carny fair—so freakishly wrong that, whatever one thinks about the folly of reading the inner from the outer, the deed seemed already written there.

“Willie Donaldson… once told me that promiscuity was the motorway to loneliness. We were on our way to score crack at the time, and Willie’s prostituée de ce jours-là was in the back seat”

As we drove on, I glanced the inchoate slaughter in the rear-view mirror: the old hitman had a firearm even uglier than his face resting on his lap—a “whippet,” a sawn-off shotgun—and he was wearing transparent rubber gloves like a surgeon. I turned to my mate Chris, himself once an armed blagger, and said, “Jesus, Chris, the guy in the back is tooled.”

Chris didn’t even look round. “Yeah, Will,” he said, with perfect sang-froid, “it only gets real when the guns come out.” And that’s the point: it’s only when you’re staring into the dead eight of the whippet’s barrels that you realize you’re going to die not at the moment of your choosing, that it was always waiting for you, this death, tinging the brightest days, and that others will walk happily through those days, wearing clean, airy clothing, and sparkling underwear, while you shit yourself in terror, die, then rot or burn. An authentically real death, as well as a self-destructive one.

Sexual Self-Destruction

Which brings me naturally to sexual self-destruction: the long goodbye that follows le petit mort. Willie Donaldson, the satirist and founder of Soho’s Establishment Club—which made the careers of so many British comedians—once told me that promiscuity was the motorway to loneliness. We were on our way to score crack at the time, and Willie’s prostituée de ce jours-là was in the back seat: the age difference was the same as that between Lot and his daughters, assuming Lot had a similar lifespan to others of the Biblical prophets. And, as everyone knows (although how, precisely?), loneliness is itself a potent form of self-destruction. The question is: How much promiscuity is required to get you feeling unutterably isolated and forlorn––so much so, you can feel your very individuality being abraded by time itself, leaving you peeled and quaking in another harsh, radioactive dawn? Levels as high as those claimed by Georges Simenon—who boasted of more than 10,000 encounters—will do, if you can organize it. Vice versa of course obtains: Bonnie Blue, who in 2025 allowed 1,025 men to perform sex acts on her body, is, I feel reasonably certain, a lonely and deeply self-destructive woman.

But multiplicity is not the only route. There is also the opposite condition: becoming so repellent to oneself that one would not permit even a loving, concerned partner or parent to offer bare, physical reassurance. A more efficient method of inducing this is not complicated seriality but facile compression: enact intimacy with at least two people within a 12-hour period—better still, within one or two. The result is the truly alienating experience of attempting arousal while treating both your own body and another’s as purely instrumental. Persist, and you will feel your body become a tool. Persist further by masturbating in between the two acts of coitus while simultaneously fantasizing about both, and the tool will break.

Spiritual Self-Destruction

Almost invariably, when people have physically and sexually destroyed themselves, and find themselves lonely and unable to endure their own reflection, they turn to God. The problem is that, within the Abrahamic traditions, God is already responsible for destruction. He has, in effect, taken over your role, leaving the self-destructive in a peculiar double bind: God may well want you dead––but what for? It may explain why missionary faiths such as Christianity and Islam—despite their irenic theologies—have historically been so warlike. Driven toward self-annihilation, but denied divine intervention, the faithful seek instead to get others to do it. With big knives. 

Alternatively, one may adopt a more modern approach and simply kill God with an act of intellectual willing (get it?). This was the path taken by Friedrich Nietzsche. His philosophy is stimulating, original, and deeply influential upon our own incompetently and selfishly existential era; yet it is worth recalling that he was driven, in part, by failed intimacies—most notably his rupture with Richard Wagner, who reportedly circulated rumors of Nietzsche’s chronic addiction to self-abuse. Whether or not this was true prior to Wagner’s Getsomecuntwerke on him––Nietzsche didn’t, and so it became true, resulting in too much Alpine hiking, beastly headaches, and eventually deicide. Having killed God, Nietzsche was left with the law of self-will alone—like Ivan Karamazov or Aleister Crowley, or… moi. No wonder he ended by going mad while embracing a horse in Turin, the manuscript of Ecce Homo (“behold the man”: Herod’s words to the crowd baying for Christ’s pre-programmed auto-destruction) lying open in the tiny room of his pensione—which, in case you haven’t noticed, is an anagram of “one penis” Spooky.

Psychological Self-Destruction

The chief method here is brooding. To brood effectively, find a warm, comfortable place and a soft surface, then place upon it small objects of value—a wedding ring, perhaps, or something more absurd, like a single-use vape—and sit upon the objects, allowing their pressure to impress upon you the futility of acquisition. Then tip forward and fix your gaze upon your own navel, as though it were a keyhole into your psyche. Contemplate it as a mandala. It may begin to spin. This, combined with the migration of your sense of self into your gastrointestinal tract, will induce a profound nausea.

This is not a million miles from the nausea I recently experienced having an allogenic stem cell transplant for secondary myelofibrosis. This, together with all the conditioning drugs associated with what is still spooky science, induced in me, on and off, ooh… a couple of years of nausea, some of it so intense I was taking morphine bi-hourly, although this seems, um, a bit contra-indicated. Anyhoo, the point is, I know my brooding sickness, and immunotherapy has to be a strong contender––along with a lot of the behavior already mentioned––for achieving it. So: carry on with the carcinogens.

“Enact intimacy with at least two people within a 12-hour period—better still, within one or two”

But however you achieve this state, at this point, you may experience––in terms of your own psyche’s temporalization––what Henri Bergson’s philosophy explicated: the sensation of being both the flowing river and the observer of it. You/it are flowing inexorably, carving new channels, being fed by tributaries, chuckling over rocks, whispering between rushes, rushing over cataracts––but what’s this!? A vast slough of toxic waste, comprising, it would seem, all the tailings from all the child rare-metal miners in the Congo––a slough into which River You debouches, with dissolvent effects.

For the adept, enlightenment eventually arrives when one feels the head plunging inward through the navel, the body feeding into itself, such that rather than experiencing renaissance, one becomes instead a tightly-wound ball of flesh, like a balled sock.

Social Self-Destruction

In his great social novel, recounting all the dreadful parties, salons, and balls he felt compelled to attend, Marcel Proust observed that there is no place in polite society for those who tell the truth. This is explained by Proust’s aperçu having been coined once the invites stopped arriving. But it can be widened: there is no place in any society whatsoever for anyone who tells the truth consistently. The method, therefore, is simple. Tell her the dress is dreadful, her hair lank, and she’s either a lousy friend, a lousy fuck––or both. With him, it’s simpler: you simply imply he is poorly endowed, while he will never be able to afford to make an endowment. Tell them both their ideology will doom them, and substantiate this with well-chosen and meticulously researched examples of when it has doomed their forefathers and mothers in the past, or doomed other societies that have cleaved to it.

Speak plainly and persistently, and the result will be social death.

I know, because I have done––and with elegance, too––for 30 years, and can count the number of my friends on my leprous fingers. When I find them.

Once socially dead, or exiled to a lazaret, you will no longer find yourself at tedious gatherings eating stale crisps and drinking flat mineral water out of obligation, and because you, too, have en route attended a full alphabet of fellowships, all the way from AA to Zoophiles Anonymous. (I, too, bear those scars.) Instead, you will confront the more fundamental truth: people do not like you. Sigmund Freud noted that anyone who reaches adulthood believing otherwise is a fool. Social self-destruction thus becomes identical with truth-telling—directed not only outward, but inward. Sit there brooding (as above), and navel-gazing: can it really be true that no one likes you that much? After all, your mother/father/their criminally inappropriate friend loved you… didn’t they? No. They didn’t.

Mass Self-Destruction

Finally, there is the simplest form: belonging to a self-destructive society. This requires no effort. Simply continue as you are. You already inhabit a nuclear-armed state whose leaders threaten you with annihilation, even as they threaten to rain it down on those pesky others. Moreover, they’re prepared to do so while ignoring the environmental catastrophe that approaches. Under such conditions, one may even choose to foreclose personal self-destruction altogether—for, like a terminally ill centenarian, there is, perhaps, little point in hastening what is already assured.

Will Self’s new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality, is available now through Atlantic Books.

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

The post The VICE Guide to Self-Destruction appeared first on VICE.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My wife says I’m a people pleaser. I want to turn over a new leaf (maybe to please her?!) so I’m making a resolution to be less of a weathervane and stand up for myself more. But it’s hard — I love to fit in. I’m a joiner and a collaborator. It’s not that I’m passive, it’s more that I find other people’s “ways of being” contagious. Sometimes I catch myself slipping into imitation of the friends or colleagues I’m talking to.

What’s a chameleon to do? Or, more scarily, who am I when I’m alone? How do I find out who I really am?

Dear Identity Crisis,

At first glance, it’s a bit funny to be accused of being a people pleaser as if it’s entirely a bad thing. It sounds like you have others’ interests genuinely in mind, and that seems like a nice way to build connection.

But I find the term people pleaser to also be a sneaky euphemism. Do you want to know how this sort of behavior is often discussed in the psychological literature? In studies, it’s not always called people pleasing; it’s called lying. 

In fact, wanting to please other people is an incredibly prevalent motivation for lying; it’s more common than lying for personal gain or pleasure. When psychologists evaluated the top reasons that people lied in their everyday life, many wanted to seem more agreeable. Their lies support seemingly magnanimous goals, like complimenting a friend or making sure a social interaction went well. But they were lies all the same, defined by the researchers as a “message that one gives to another in which they are deliberately deceiving them.” 

I find this shift in perspective helpful, if a little harsh, if you’re looking to break a people-pleasing habit. It’s one thing to think about yourself as dedicated to keeping other people pleased. But when you consider that actually, all of your interactions are suffused with lies, the approach becomes a bit more unsavory. 

Imagine the situation in reverse: What if you found out that all the time you had spent with a close friend, they were keeping their real thoughts and feelings from you? You might feel differently about the time you’d spent together. I can bet it certainly wouldn’t feel as authentic. 

I used to be a bartender, and I would be nice and mildly obsequious to frequent customers. Several of them I genuinely liked. But I’ll never forget the uncomfortable moments of running into a regular elsewhere — and their figuring out that we weren’t actually friends. There’s a distance between two people when one’s main role is to please the other. You are creating that distance, even if you may not realize it, and not even getting tipped for it. 

So for starters, try trusting that the people around you are able to handle your real thoughts and feelings. But what are your real thoughts or feelings? This points to the bigger conundrum you face: Who is your true self? 

You’re in good company worrying about this. Religious figures, philosophers, and scientists alike have been trying to figure out if there even is a continuous self, and if there is, what is it made up of? 

Scientifically speaking, there’s not a part of your brain that’s “truer” than others, or where the true self resides. But your ideas about your true self matter, according to research by Rebecca Schlegel, a social scientist at Texas A&M University. She has found that people have greater well-being and find their lives to be more meaningful if they think that they’ve made choices that align with who they “really” are. 

When people make a decision that they think aligns with their own true self, it regularly leads to feeling more satisfaction with that decision — more so than choices steered by considering what other people want, by religious belief, or by advice from others. 

Doing this yourself can be remarkably simple. In one experiment, Schlegel asked participants to make an arbitrary decision and told some to “use your true self” to make up their minds, and others to “use rational thinking.” Those who framed their choices as being guided by their true self were much happier with their selection. For you, it could be that just introducing the question — what would my true self do? — can start making your life feel more like it belongs to you. 

If it feels odd to ask your true self what to do, defining your truest self as what’s moral about you isn’t a bad place to start. Researchers have found again and again that when they ask people which of their traits feel the “truest,” it’s usually the parts that are morally good. When I call my mother on her birthday, that’s my true self. When I say something hurtful to my friend, that’s a deviation from my true self, who knows better. I wasn’t myself this morning, I might say as an apology. So you could make a list of your best qualities, like your generosity or your creativity. Then, when you ask what your core self would do, you’ll have even more specific guideposts to follow. 

Of course, if having a true self still doesn’t feel relatable, you can turn to an approach I’ve found helpful in my own life from Eastern traditions, like Buddhism and Taoism. They endorse the idea that there is no rigid self at all. In Buddhism, this is called anatman, which translates roughly to “no self.” This teaching emerged in response to an earlier Hindu belief: a concept called “atman,” which asserted that all people had an eternal and unchanging core, similar to a soul. Anatman was a rebuttal to that idea.

I’ve found that anatman relieves some of the pressure around all of this. We feel as if there should be an essence to us, some permanent quality that persists over time that you can point to. But anatman reminds us that there’s no aspect of the self that doesn’t change.  

Life is long, and we transform throughout it. As we grow, we learn new physical skills like playing soccer and the piano, and eventually acquire back problems and wrinkles. Our minds evolve too. We read novels, maybe we can do calculus, and we develop political convictions. Hopefully, we gain the skills of being kind and patient. In all of these developments, change is the only constant. This is why the Buddha thought that you couldn’t find the singular, stable self in any of these places — not the mind, the physical form, our habits, or our perceptions. “What is impermanent, subject to change…cannot be taken to be ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ or a ‘self,’” the Buddha taught. 

You asked what you, as a chameleon, should do? You could frame everything you do as being in service to your deeper self. Or you could try halting the search for a strictly defined, enduring version of you, and start making decisions based on who you want that person to become.   

Bonus: What I’m reading

• My book club just read Love, Always, a novel by Ann Beattie, about a group of people who start a magazine in rural Vermont. It’s a summery tale, though somewhat frustrating, about what happens when people don’t change themselves, and only follow their worst instincts. 
• This is a fascinating story of multiple selves in Popular Mechanics by Michael Natale. It documented what happened when seven men confessed to being the culprit of a plane hijacking in 1973 in the Pacific Northwest.
• Over the course of several nights recently, I watched the 1926 silent movie, Faust, directed by F.W. Murnau. It’s a haunting tragedy about the consequences of wanting to hold onto a quality of yourself indefinitely — in this case, staying young forever. I was amazed by the special effects they pulled off for that era! An evergreen reminder that if someone promises you something that’s too good to be true (especially if he looks like the devil), it probably is. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.