Note: Managing my social media input is still a work in progress. In many ways it feels like a work in progress that I keep failing at. I fall back to old habits far too often and end up on the losing end of the attention battle.

The last two weeks has been hard on my cognitive reserves. A few dramas happened on my current social media platforms of choice: Weibo and Xiao Hong Shu, otherwise incorrectly christened as “Red Note” by US folks.

Weibo – I detailed it in my recent Substack edition, but basically:

• An actor loses it and destroys his career in a series of unhinged social media posts
• An actor gets trafficked to Myanmar, girlfriend uses social media to get government’s attention and finally rescues him
• An actress has a nervous breakdown and reveals things about the entertainment industry that melts everything down
  Xiao Hong Shu:
• the Yanks have arrived on a primarily Chinese platform.

As a result, previous habits have gone out of the window:

• Leaving the phone out of the bedroom
• Checking the phone only at set times during the day
• Not checking the phone first thing in the morning but reading and taking a walk instead

Needless to say I’ve not felt more mentally exhausted in my life!

About a few weeks before the Yank migration to XHS, I decided that Weibo was a sewer and have downgraded the time I’ve spent there. I like the prettier, calmer vibe on XHS.

Until the US folks arrived.

Sigh.

What can I say? The kind of negativity, pessimism and doomerism about the world I wanted off my feeds is now back with a vengeance. My tranquil feed of Chinese dramas and food videos and travel vlogs is now replaced by Americans constantly complaining about something, whether it be about how awful their country is, blathering about US politics and asking annoying questions about China.

I guess, compared to most Chinese folks in China, this is not recent exposure for me. I’ve had to endure this type of content for decades. I need a break from all this self absorbed negativity, but I can’t get a break on XHS now. (Weeps.)

Anyway, this is a good sign for me though. It means that I’m near the end of my fascination with the Yankee exodus and will mentally disengage and my fixation will dissipate soon.

Still, this Yankee flood did bring about good things, namely:

• I found genuinely lovely American people to follow
• Chinese people who are sharing their very normal lives
• Fantastic, high-end Chinese creators who share about arts, craft, martial arts and more

Like any other social media, XHS has a “For you” feed which I now actively avoid, though XHS’s algorithm is amazing. All you have to do is mark posts you don’t like and the feed changes instantly.

Instead, I dwell mostly on my Follow feed now. I will probably dip into “For you” only to find some folks but I don’t think I will that often.

Social media is what you make of it. And if there’s one thing I realise about myself is that I don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for social media.

I’m not active on Meta platforms, not because I have a problem with Meta (I do) but primarily because I find the information and marketing deluge overwhelming.

I’m only on Mastodon and only interact with a small handful of genuinely lovely people. My other channel is Substack, and I’m getting more and more adverse to its social media side (Notes) and am now just hanging out in the newsletter spaces of my favourite writers.

My website remains my little center of content sharing, and I think that’s about as complex as my social media consumption will get.