Pick cheaper interests is my only advice lol. If you have to purchase something for a new hobby and itās over X amount, donāt allow yourself to buy it. My latest hobby is lock picking. Not expensive and I donāt feel guilty picking it up and randomly doing it every few days or so.
Also, get off of social media. The constant scrolling and mental bombardment of other peopleās interests mixed with ads for things, is what keeps these kinds of obsessions going. Your brain basically gets overwhelmed with information and never actually slows down to enjoy and sink into anything. Iāve since deleted all social media, and started doing yoga every morning and night to calm my mind, and I find these constant brain overloads have reduced considerably.
I think there are plenty of people that want to fix these issues, but at least in the US (and I guess anywhere that is falling into fascism), they are locked out or hindered by politicians and other ghouls who are too preoccupied stripping everything for parts before they ultimately bail and leave behind a fucking mess (2008 housing crash vibes).
Itās been a nice window into their culture and daily lives, and theyāve been extremely welcoming. As an American that is pretty much burnt out on my countryās bullshit and inability to be respectful and friendly, that is a breath of fresh air.
Iāve been on Rednote for a while now and learning and chatting with Chinese folks has made me less anxious, more mindful, and generally more positive. Itās teaching me Taoism, QiGong, and given me tea and food recipes.
Iāve since deleted every Meta account because western social media has given me nothing but meaningless, empty scrolling, anxiety, and bombarded me with adsāa lot of which were extremely questionable.
Another major shift has come in online shopping, where Americans are flocking to digital Chinese marketplaces such as Temu and Shein in search of ultra-low prices on clothes, home goods, and other items.
I donāt shop at these places but this is what happens when you make absolutely everything in America way too expensive while paying people shit. They find cheaper alternatives.
Western social media will use all of your data to spy on you on a daily basis. If weāre going to criticize Chinese social media, the spotlight needs to be turned on America also. Meta is predatory, and has helped fuel genocide, and TikTok is now a compromised mess.
The right side is just liberalism. This is what happens when the left and liberal are melded together in everyday western society/language and the water is muddied. Itās intended. It confuses people, overwhelms them, and leads them to use the apparatus that the ruling class has placed in front of us to circumvent true working class interests and movements. Itās why liberals scoff at potential allies (leftists), instead of seeing the truth: a unified working class.
I still have some of my original NES game booklets, including the one for Link. I kept them in a plastic bag so theyāre all mint! I keep the Doom 64 booklet in my office space for fun.
Itās only Chinese surveillance and censorship when you donāt use an open source fork of DeepSeek, which is not possible with OpenAI or any of the other US-based big names. Thereās already versions of DS that remove the telemetry and censorship. So it becomes a moot point for one and an unsolvable problem for the others.
Edit: I canāt find one that mentions removal or blocking of telemetry, but this one removes the censorship mechanism. Point still stands. Your data is out there with whoever your AI provider is. Itās part of why I donāt use AI for anything sensitive or important.
All AI does this. It just becomes more obvious that this is tired old anti-China propaganda because we donāt see similar articles for OpenAI and other US-based AI tools.
The difference is that OpenAI is closed-source so you never know what itās actually doing, and DeepSeek being open source means the data being sent can be seen, and the mechanisms can be removed.
A bunch of superfluous code that you find does nothing.