Your Phone is Killing Your Obsession

Welcome to the 130 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2200+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) I'll be spending the next two weeks working from Tenerife. If you live here, let's meet up. If you've been here and have any recommendations, shoot them my way.

2) Kanso is growing! Over the next four months, we’ll be hosting phone-free events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London (and NYC as always).

If you’re interested in attending any of these or bringing a Kanso event to your city, reply to this email.

Good stuff, let’s get into it.

I’m gonna let you in on a secret.

Most people don’t actually want less screen time.

They just want more interesting lives.

It’s not their fault. When you finally delete TikTok and lock your phone in a kitchen safe, what’s waiting on the other side?

Empty time. Unstructured afternoons. That weird moment when you're just... sitting there. No dopamine. No noise.

Just the slow tick of a clock and a creeping realization that you don’t actually know what to do with yourself.

You get all that time back and then suddenly, one hour feels like three.

That’s time distortion in action. And it hits hardest when you don’t have anything to channel your energy into.

No momentum. No curiosity. Just space you don’t know how to fill.

That’s why doomscrolling is so tempting. It’s easy. It gives your brain a job. Even if it leaves you feeling worse, it keeps the boredom at bay. You’re not reaching for your phone because you’re weak. You’re reaching for it because nothing else is pulling you in.

You can’t beat that habit with willpower. You have to replace it with something stronger.

Something that genuinely holds your attention. Ideally, something that you’re obsessed with. The thing you can do for five hours straight without eating, without thinking about checking texts, without needing external validation.

Something that feels like play to you and work to everyone else. That’s the thing you build your life around.

It’s why I don’t really care about “digital balance” in the traditional sense. I’m not trying to hit some perfect ratio of screen time.

I care about designing a life that’s more interesting than my phone and making it easier for myself to discover what lights me up.

Lately, that’s been building Kanso and hosting ‘unplugged’ events. When I’m in the middle of an event, I feel it. That click. That full-body presence. I’m not wondering what’s happening on my phone. I’m fully there.

And people who come to these events feel it too. Time bends in the other direction.

After three hours of talking, meeting people, and being ‘on’, they look up and go, “Wait, it’s already 10 p.m.?”

They didn’t ‘detox.’ They just forgot their phones existed.

But that kind of presence only happens when you care about what you’re doing. Most people haven’t found that yet which is why they bounce back to their phone the second there’s a gap in the day.

And the only way to find that better thing is to give yourself time to try. But that’s the part that most people skip.

To find that thing, you need time to try shit.

We forget that there used to be a natural window in life when this kind of exploration was encouraged.

Especially when you’re young and untethered, with fewer responsibilities and more freedom to mess around. That time was for making dumb YouTube videos with friends, starting blogs, learning to DJ badly, or diving into random curiosities just because they sparked something.

That’s how people used to stumble into the work and ideas that shaped who they became.

Now, that time is stolen by algorithmic consumption and doomscrolling. It’s entertaining. It feels familiar. But it quietly erases the conditions you need for self-discovery — boredom, friction, depth.

And then one day you look up. You’re older. You’ve got a job, a partner, maybe a toddler melting down in the other room. The ideas are still there. The energy’s (maybe) still there. But the time to act on it is a lot harder to access.

At that point, the phone stops being a break from boredom and more a break from responsibility. And the longer you reach for it, the harder it gets to carve out space for reinvention.

That’s what makes this so dangerous.

If you don’t give yourself room to experiment, you don’t discover.

And if you don’t discover, you don’t find the thing that changes everything.

That’s why I give myself an experimentation budget every year — a set amount of money and time that I fully expect to burn. No expectations. No guaranteed ROI.

Just space to follow instincts, try things, and see what sticks. Sometimes it turns into something real. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it always moves me forward.

Funny enough, that experimentation window — paired with ~two months of heavily reduced tech use — is how the idea for Kanso came to life.

And it’s also why I’ve spent the last year and a half learning Spanish. Not for work. Not for content. Just because I was curious and wanted to learn something new that I could use when I travel.

Now I’m in Tenerife, meeting my Spanish teacher in person for the first time. All because I gave myself permission to go a little deeper into something that felt worth it.

So here’s what I tell people: start small.

Don’t try to optimize every second. Try to enjoy a few of them. Pick one thing this week that feels even slightly better than scrolling. It doesn’t need to change your life. It just needs to interrupt the pattern.

Go on a walk without headphones. Cook something. Call a friend and don’t look at the clock. Nerd out about a topic you’ve been curious about. Read one chapter of a book and then sit there doing nothing for five minutes. You’ll probably feel uncomfortable. Restless. Like your brain is trying to climb out of your body.

Good. That means it’s working.

If you keep showing up for those moments, they start to shift. You begin to notice what holds your attention naturally. What feels good in a way that lasts. Eventually, you stumble into something that sticks. Something that makes you forget about your phone altogether. Something that makes time move differently.

At that point, screen time isn’t a battle anymore. You’re not resisting it. You’re just living.

And that’s the real goal.

That’s all for this week. A lot more exciting updates to come. See you soooooon.

Now stop scrolling and go do something great!

— Randy