From what I have seen, many travelers seek novelty, movement, and temporary escape. As in so many other activities, some merely seek the appearance of seeking.

From what I have seen, many travelers seek novelty, movement, and temporary escape. As in so many other activities, some merely seek the appearance of seeking. The appearance of experience and worldliness, as an expression of fashion, tribe, and belonging. You see this in natural settings too, with people more concerned with checking off a list of national parks and sign posts than with actually experiencing the natural world beyond the postcard framing. Ironically, if everyone were an itinerant traveler, there would be no local cultures to visit. Everyone you meet would be another generic gap year traveler and every place would be a youth hostel. There would be no real locality to sample. I think only a small percentage of pleasure travelers are really looking for the cultural enrichment romanticized in travel stories. Even then, this is shallow experience-seeking as compared to a field anthropologist who methodically studies and compares cultures. And, neither of these compare to the immigrant who transplants themself permanently into a new, adopted culture. A peculiar kind of travel you see in immigrants, even multigenerationally, is heritage tourism. It's almost a reversal of escape and novelty-seeking. They seek some return to a faint memory or myth of the old country.