First off, "traveling" within the usa is not traveling. The usa is absolutely uniform now, the exact same from miami to portland. Regional variation has been erased. You eat the same hamburger or chili's entree for 3000 miles, listen to the same songs and the same voices on the radio, the same commercials, see the same billboards advertising the same trash products, even the architecture is the same: square. The usa is a cultural wasteland and if you think by flying from Akron to Charlotte and checking into the days inn is travel, the entire rest of the world pities you.
But the same problem exists among those tools who "travel" abroad also. People who travel just to travel (ie tourists) are the biggest wankers on the planet. It doesn't show culture or intelligence, it shows the exact opposite of those things. It shows you have enough money to buy a plane ticket and a hotel room, nothing more. It is not adventurous. Your flying for six/eight hours in coach to stand in front of some monument you read about in the guidebook and take the same picture two billion other people have taken doesn't make you indiana jones. You're more of a tool than you would be had you stayed home. Your contrived wish for "adventure" has blighted someone else's home and turned it into a tourist trap, a soulless pool of people squirming to leech off your laziness and stupidity. Tourism should be made illegal, for the cultural blight that it causes in communities. And 99% of what people now are calling "travel" is nothing more than blind, gutless, unimaginative, soulless tourism. You are paying for the privilege of being a complete idiot in someone else's home neighbourhood.
The same goes for the backpacker youth, of course. They aren't exonerated. That is every bit in the same class of tourism. Just a different guidebook. It is all the same shit. Every person who has spent a year backpacking around the world has gone to the same places as every other tool who did the same thing. They all know the same places, ate at the same restaurants, and had the same experiences. It's all very much a package deal. The adventure portion of it is maybe getting stuck out in the rain once or twice before they find the hostel. Everything else is as homogenised as their home country.
But none of it matters because the tools back in the corn-belt of america will consider you an exotic globetrotter even though you were only a package tourist. They've seen it on TV and in the movies so for idiots it still has some glamour attached to it. But if you find fulfilment in your life by impressing boobs, retarded people, illiterate scum, and taco bell employees, then you are one of them, so by all means go right ahead.
The only travel that is actually worthwhile anymore is LIVING abroad for the long term. Years. If you are in a situation where you are an immigrant and fully integrate into a foreign society, then you may gain some slightly elevated, interesting perspective. Still probably not. Much of the world, the cities especially now, are going the exact same way as the entire USA already has. Homogenised, level, everything same. So you almost have to live abroad long-term in some off-piste place to be legit anymore. Otherwise you're just the same as the guidebook tourists.
If you are the .05% who actually get this and understand it, you don't need to be told that anyone who esteems you just for "travelling" is a complete fool and doesn't warrant the time of day from you.