The buy experiences meme has always had a slight air of having been engineered in travel industry laboratory somewhere and released into the wild.
This is why car adverts are either belting round implausibly empty urban streets, or of Wankpanzers off-roading in a way almost no owner will actually do. "Buy this and this is the experience you're connecting with".
I'm rather confused by the article's point. It really reinforces that it's all experience, and really, material goods are just a means to an end.
Look - if I want to go experience Bali, it's not like I have to buy an aeroplane to do so. We _vastly_ overestimate the marginal utility of a more expensive car or some slightly different shoes in the sense of what additional experiences it's going to give us.
And, frankly, if you're claiming your shoe purchases increase your wellbeing because they don't hurt then I might suggest you pay more attention to purchasing the correct size for your feet (Stop buying from the Dolmansaxlil shoe corporation).
ISTR that materialistic humans being on a hedonic treadmill has quite a lot of evidence.
Compare a hard discount grocery store to a regular supermarket, and we see the supermarket invisting significant money (and increasing prices) to improve the customer experience, and many customers willing to pay the price to not shop in what looks like a warehouse, even if they'd buy roughly the same products.
* to sell "experiences" to people because those marketers had services to sell;
* to sell "experiences" to people because the target demographic couldn't afford possessions; or
* more a psyop campaign, to placate demographics for whom the memes are that they'll never own a home, never be able to retire, etc.
Or all three.
Sure, there was the random carefree person who just liked to surf every day, and somehow ends got met, but for the rest of us, we were sold on expectations of homeownership, vehicles, consumer products. We can see that society is set up to expect people to have those things, and we can see how people's experience is generally better when they can afford those possessions.
Sending people to the other side of the world is overrated, but confronting your world views with actual experiences is a price worth paying most of the time.
Same way experiencing at least once a well cooked, well made dish can effectively lead you cook it better for the rest of your life.
As anything, it varies from people to people, and there's no single truth out there.
However, not every trip can be that. The more you travel, the weaker the experience becomes, and eventually one reaches a point where there is little left to learn by being on the road.