The person returning with fewer souvenirs may have brought home a different kind of abundance.

What a trip yields does not always fit in a bag. Somebody who comes back with nothing to show may have spent their days sitting in one square, learning a few sentences, or talking to the same shopkeeper each morning, and that kind of return is hard to display and easy to undervalue. Objects prove where you went. They say very little about what happened there.

When you next travel, decide in advance what you want to come home with that is not an object. And when someone returns, ask what they noticed rather than what they brought.