Great observation! There might be an element of self-destructiveness, and there are probably many other drives. It might also be that self-destruction serves a larger purpose.
I think that the overall drive is to realize our full potential, and this drive often gets warped through non-integrated wounds from the past. Everything I have been going through has been bringing these up for integration.
I think I could have pushed forward to ever more “success” based on external metrics, but been failing inside. I think that my process has an overall goal of deep, lasting, fulfilling success based on my own personal, internal metrics.