One of tropes of advertising is the "experience" that travel brings. Spiced with a pinch of moral superiority, we're often told that experiences are better than mere things. A new phone or lamp will simply gather dust in the shed, or fees in the storage warehouse, whereas an experience will be edifying, enriching – transformative, in a word.

This outlook is muddled. Most obviously, there is nothing inherently unexperiential about objects. They're often what occasion experiences: artworks, faces, landscapes; reproductions of these; objects we associate with these reproductions. A well-curated home, for example, can be suggestive, not stifling.

In fact, new objects are often what make foreign countries so striking: the unusual things, in strange relations, that undermine our sense of normality. The Eiffel Tower, for example, is more than a familiar prop for selfies – it is an object that evokes a very specific moment in French history.

The building, with its stark modernist lines, arose in an era of rapid technological change, which altered the modern sense of time and space. As geographer David Harvey points out, Gustave Eiffel's design is a monument to industrialisation, and the heightened control that can encourage psychological and social fragmentation.

The point is not that every holiday ought to have a neat Marxist conclusion, but that there is no easy conflict between experiences and things.

Also, tourism is as transformative as the tourists involved. Plenty of holidaymakers bring back memories, but these are merely pleasurable: a comfortable pew for the mind, not a crucible. Again, this need not be a point of smug superiority. It is simply a reminder that foreign countries are as normal as we make them, and it takes a great deal of effort to pass from superficial difference to profound realisation.

This principle works for our own countries: it is possible to be thoroughly at home in Melbourne without comprehending its class tensions, or its relationship to distant cities like Darwin or Perth. Picking up a novel about Sydney, like Charlotte Wood's Animal People, can be a better way to confront the rich oddness of other human beings than a package tour – provided the book's read with patience, curiosity and a little courage.

What travel usually occasions is the opportunity for questions, not easy certainties. I recently flew to Asia for Australian Writers' Week. One of the highlights was Nami Island in South Korea, a cultural precinct north-east of Seoul.

Nami is brimming with artistic venues, archives and goods. It hosts rock 'n' roll and rare musical instrument museums, several performance stages, a ceramics kiln, calligraphy studio, sculptures (often made from recycled soju bottles). It hosts an international children's book fair, sponsors the Hans Christian Anderson Award for children's literature and illustration, and has a sublime library of kids' books: a wall, some three metres high, of vibrant covers. There are rabbits, peacocks and, surprisingly, emus. The famous Metasequoia Lane, with its avenue of tall conifers, surpasses its own ubiquitous publicity.

The range of cultural events and objects on Nami is incredible, and it makes their playful secession – declaring themselves an independent republic, complete with flag and passport – all the more understandable.

The question for me is how this marvellous ferment squares with the portrait of South Korea as a capitalist wasteland. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in Trouble in Paradise, declares that the nation is fully digitised, atomised, commodified. It was, Žižek argues, essentially razed by conflict, ripe for a new regime of precarious work and rapid consumption, with no traditions left to resist the transformation of people into well-fed but lonely, anxious workers.

It is, writes Žižek, "a place deprived of its history, a wordless place". In his eyes, the hugely popular Gangnam Style track becomes a ritual of communal ideology, promoting a kind of thrilled disgust. It offers no escape from zombie existence, except defeated irony.

Does this make Nami merely a comforting museum? A way to keep alive the illusion of authenticity, before returning to the office on Monday? Or might its promotion of arts, scholarship and play provide the occasional break from ideology, and allow for reflection if not revolution?

I don't know the answer. Perhaps Žižek doesn't either. The point is that travel prompts the question, by affording palpable encounters to deny, affirm, complicate and trivialise. It is not merely something you do ("we did Prague last year"), but something you do things with. A holiday from familiarity, not from thought.

Damon Young is a Melbourne philosopher and author. www.damonyoung.com.au.