For the majority of people, we all are currently being consumed by the black hole that is known as life on a daily basis. The issue with this isn't the fact that it seems nearly impossible to escape from it but rather that we self indulge ourselves by willingly entering this alluring black hole. What is this black hole that I'm talking about? It's the culturescape of life that we live in today.

Now take a moment to step back from everything and peer into your life from an outside perspective. I want you all to answer three very simple questions honestly about yourself in front of a mirror:

1. Are you currently holding back from what your instinct is telling you?

2. Is where you are going providing you with what you truly want out of your experience?

3. Irrespective of all the external factors, are the reasons and motivations for what you are doing absolutely clear to you?

These three pinpointed questions can explain everything there is to you as a human being I can guarantee you. The hardest part about answering these questions is coming to terms with how much we all deviate from the truth by playing safe in the culturescape that has been defined for us over hundreds of years and a multitude of repeated societal constructs. It isn't a problem to feel a bit worried or upset when you candidly answer these questions and find out the truth - heck, I was in disarray when I faced myself head on with these questions. It's a matter of learning how to take this self confrontation and turn it into actionable steps that lead to happiness and fulfillment of self.

Let's take for example the high school student that we can all likely relate to to better illustrate this point. If you take the culturescape's view of what the high school student should be aiming for, it could probably be more or less summed up by:

"I need to study hard so I can get good grades and do well on the SATs so that I can get into a good college. I then need to get a good GPA in college and good scores on my admission tests so that I can get a good job after graduating and go to a good graduate school. From then, I need to work hard so that I can progress upwards in my career, start a family and support it, and save towards my retirement."

Look at how society has programmed us to think in terms of a checklist/ladder. There is something that you continue to chase after (the "so thats" in the above description) once you checked off another box on your list or took yet another step up that ladder. We get consumed in this framework that life has set out for ourselves. Life's black hole takes grasp and seemingly won't let go of its vicious grip on you. We've all been taught this mindset and a follower of it since the very early days of our childhoods. It's a mechanism that teaches us to survive and compare, which is further reinforced by these two innate behaviors that stem from the human brain.

Now let me take you out of this black hole. Go back to those three questions I asked earlier. I ask myself those very questions every so often and find that the answers erratically keep changing when, in fact, they shouldn't after having asked myself them the first time. That's when you realize how you are teeter tottering on the brink of escaping the black hole. Like the real ones in space, this black hole has an immense pull that is hard to resist, but indeed it can be done.

At the end of the day, I realized that a lot of things were simply "fluff" throughout my life and I wanted to cut out this bullshit and be able to navigate straight towards the end goal instead of the means goals that society had taught me to follow. In fact, take a look back at the summation of a high school student's aims in life that I presented earlier. It really shouldn't take that much time to express and sum up what a high school kid should be reaching for. That's when you start to realize all the baggage that you have been carrying as a result of your life experiences in the culturescape have confounded the very simple truth that has always been present within you. I started to see how important it is to try and cut as much of that baggage away from yourself throughout your lifetime.

It all comes back to the idea of fulfillment. As Tony Robbins likes to put it, there is a science to succeeding that life has constructed out for you to follow but fulfillment isn't like that. Rather, it's an art that you have to explore and mold to your own personal being. One of the worst feelings in life, and boy have I experienced this time and time again, is when you succeed at something but don't feel fulfilled. That is the black hole's influence on you that will terrorize you for the rest of your life if you succumb to its safety hold day in and day out. You are prone to the infinite loop of asking how do I keep outdoing myself to try and reach, what seems attainable, fulfillment, but this ultimately leads to being miserable.

This is when you have to take the biggest risk of your life and take the unconventional route. It is going to feel awkward and terrifying at first, and that's because we have been programmed to follow a framework that provides instant gratification. Escaping the black hole is about being able to detach yourself from that mindset and end your self inflicted suffering. That suffering all stems from looking at you, you, and you. To finally escape that black hole, you simply need to just focus on serving something greater than yourself and that is the most enlightening and humbling human experience that one can have that I've found from personal experience.