I sometimes think about debt the same way. In college I scraped by on ramen noodles and avoided doing anything that cost money. For example I wanted to go camping but didn't have say, $100 for a tent. If I had just put the $100 on my credit card, I'd probably have happy memories with friends, but now I can't get that experience back for any price.
I want to add one more thing. The ads weren't just for a travel destination. It would be something totally out of character for us like "Let's build a tree house and rent in out on AirBnb" and there would be ads for renting out tree houses.
I have seen this first hand. At one point, I think I had figured this out because I the Facebook app had access to "Siri results", and "Siri results" is just about anything you do on your phone. We turned off Siri results, but we would still be discussing something out loud like "maybe we should go to Bali some day" and lo and behold, my wife would see ads for Bali in her Facebook stream within 1-2 hours.
That's just about the worst thing I can imagine