I think this is in-part the beauty of a certain type of travel in general, which if you do it before you form too many rigid biases, eventually sets a person apart from their grade school peers who just went full-send on their hometown or whatever. It's totally cliche, but if you just set yourself up to be forced to try and explore and enjoy different geographies, cities, food, or meet types of people you'd otherwise have avoided, then your default perspective is forever unlimited by the invisible ceiling or floor that you had before.

For me, it didn't even occur to me that it was normal to have trains/trams inside your city until I was in my twenties, and you don't even need to be NYC! Once I learned about it, my hometown pretty much lost whatever argument they might have had to get me to stay, and as soon as the option presented itself, I was out.

Travel far and outside of comfort zone changes person, any person, for good. Prophet Mohammed is quoted roughly saying: "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled".

There are non-trivial amount of people who discovered this on their own, got properly addicted and basically live in their western jobs to be able to afford as much travel ie in remote parts of south east Asia as possible. Some skipped that western job part altogether. I recently spent few weeks in remote parts of northern Sulawesi and the only westerners I kept meeting were of this bunch, with exactly same travel bug.

The problem is as you describe - you can't explain all this and much more to folks who stayed home or some variant of that. You can show photos and videos, tell stories but what that experience changed within you, thats your journey only.

Personally, this is by far the best way to spend money (plus gym membership).