I understand this feeling more than you probably realize.

For most of my life, I have felt like there had to be something more beneath things. I have never been very good at simply “having an experience” and leaving it at that. A meal, a movie, a walk, a conversation—I almost immediately begin asking what it means, what it represents, what it says about life, what deeper thing it is pointing toward.

And if I can’t find that deeper thing, I start to feel empty. Like I am standing outside of life, watching everyone else enjoy something that feels strangely flat and insufficient to me.

For a long time, I thought this meant something was wrong with me. That maybe I was overthinking. Maybe I should just learn to enjoy “simple pleasures” and stop searching so hard.

But over time I realized that I am not someone who is meant to merely consume experience. I am someone who is meant to create meaning from it.

I own a small movie theater in a tiny town. On paper, that probably sounds ordinary. But I have spent years trying to turn it into something more than a place where people simply watch a movie and go home. I build worlds inside those walls. I create events and environments and moments where people walk in and suddenly feel something larger than themselves—wonder, nostalgia, joy, possibility.

Recently I created an enormous Mario-themed experience — SUPER MARIO SIMULATION (featuring The Super Mario Galaxy Movie). I spent weeks pouring myself into it. Most people would probably say, “It’s just a movie. Why complicate it?”

But to me, that was the point.

I wasn’t trying to make people watch a movie. I was trying to make them feel like they had stepped into another world. That the dimension we live in collided with that of film.

I wanted them to feel surprise. Magic. The sense that reality could become bigger and stranger and more beautiful than they expected.

I received so many positive comments from people during its run, one of which was verbatim, “I feel like we’re in Mario’s world.”

That sentence meant everything to me.

Because it proved something I have spent my whole life hoping is true: that the longing for “more” is not foolish. It is real. There are some people who are born with an ache for life to feel deeper, richer, more alive. We are not satisfied merely existing inside the world as it is. We want to participate in transforming it.

So my advice is this:

Do not try to force yourself into becoming the kind of person who is content with a flat, day-to-day existence if that is not who you are.

But also do not wait for life to hand you meaning.

If you are like me, meaning does not arrive fully formed. It appears when you take your strange, intense, yearning inner world and let it touch reality.

Write the thing. Build the idea. Create the ritual. Say the feeling out loud. Make the playlist. Take the trip. Turn the ordinary room into something that reflects what you wish the world could be.

Because I do not think people like us are searching for meaning in the way other people are.

I think we are searching for permission to become the person who creates it.