I do agree with some of your main points. You can't learn a culture in a week, and "helping" poor people for an instagram post is definitely problematic.
However being exposed to the different types of cultures around the world can be extremely valuable and eye opening. The world is a beautiful place with lots of interesting places to explore.
My point still stands that travelling the world is not a completely shallow endeavour. However you seem obsessed with labelling people as shallow, which ironically comes across as pretty shallow in itself.
One could make a case for breadth or depth when it comes to world travel, but so far you're not doing that, you're just sniffing dismissively at a stereotype.
I'm a fan of spending weeks or months in a place, rather than days, but spending years in any one place necessarily means seeing far fewer places. Breadth vs depth.
And yes, I do read a books first 10 pages and stop reading it. Sometimes i read the first couple pages of each chapter and stop reading it. I never claim i read the whole book, or understand every nook and cranny of the rhetoric, but that book will still shape my subconscious going forward.
I feel travel is the same. As you go around the world you learn that no one has the answers, each place is entirely based on your experience of that city and everyone has different philosophies in life. It provides a sense of empathy to ideas. Meeting people who worked at hostels or people who bought a sailing boat, some fishing poles and some rice and traveled vastly changed the way i look at the world. Life is really easy in actuality, we as a species seem to complicate it.
Travel has brought me a vast amount of serenity and peacefulness in my normal life, because normal life can never be as hard as traveling.
“Life is really easy in actuality”
“Yes, I do read a books first 10 pages and stop reading it.”
Yeah we know you do buddy.