Post-Vacation Deprogramming

Since our last vacation, I've been going through bouts of thinking something was financially logical only to doubt myself. I mentioned before my ambivalence about credit card reward hacking, and that's continued. But moreover, I'm looking at all sorts of decisions before and since the vacation that are just puzzling, and I have to conclude that vacations of the modern variety are enormous mental and money traps if you're not exceedingly careful.

For example, social media is a vast reinforcement mechanism for what is normal and expected. Professionally and personally, I am surrounded by people who take fairly extravagant vacations and share them to social media. Moreover, the photography surrounding the vacations is rapidly improving, making personal vacations closely resemble advertisements.

As for advertisements, has anybody else noticed that YouTube can start to resemble ads for ads for ads? It's like ads all the way down. We watch ads before we watch our nicer more interesting ads. Whether it be for trailers, or makeup, or electronics, or just about anything else, it's easy to get sucked into a perpetual ad whirlpool.

Two realties that present real traps for me and my wife:

• We live far away from our broader families. 
• We live in the tourism capital of the world (Europe, broadly speaking). 

That makes taking some kind of vacation or extended travel somewhat inevitable. We can be careful, and we have been more careful in the past, but right now, I feel like something is off in my thinking and planning.