I'm not anti-travel and I've enjoyed it in the past but I honestly think you pretty much nailed it. People try really hard to convince themselves that, actually, they're not engaging in conspicuous consumption but instead growing as a person or whatever.
Being illegible is the point. Doctors just write 'his shit is fucked up, give him drugs or whatever idk' in Latin and if people understood that they would freak out
"To compare how far each platform has advanced across computing, simulation, networking, and sensing, the researchers used large language AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini to estimate technology-readiness levels (TRL)."
I'm not anti-travel and I've enjoyed it in the past but I honestly think you pretty much nailed it. People try really hard to convince themselves that, actually, they're not engaging in conspicuous consumption but instead growing as a person or whatever.