More Life = Better Tech Habits

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A few BIG announcements before we get into it:

1) I’m hosting another Kanso NYC Unplugged Founders event on March 19th. No phones, no distractions. Just great people & deep conversations in a beautiful venue in the East Village. Grab your tickets here.

2) I’m kicking off the first Reset45 cohort on March 18th with a select group of readers.

This one is entirely free with an optional pay-what-you-want component at the end. All community calls will be Tuesday at 2pm ET and will be recorded for those who can’t attend.

This will never be free again, so if you want to join the pilot cohort, reply to this email.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Your relationship with technology is kinda like your diet. Not in the “eat more greens, scroll less” kind of way, but in how what you consume shapes you in ways you don’t even notice.

The difference is people generally know when they’re eating like garbage. They don’t always know when their relationship with technology is wrecking them because it’s woven into everything they do.

Your tech habits seeps into your physical health. More sitting, less movement. Worse sleep, worse eating. Energy crashes, anxiety spikes. And suddenly, you’re blaming everything except the 500 subconscious decisions driven by your tech habits.

It messes with your mental health, too. Your entire reality is filtered through algorithms deciding what you see, what you think, and what you’re supposed to care about. If your digital diet is doomscrolling and comparison traps, of course you feel anxious. Of course you feel behind. The system is designed to make you feel that way.

And relationships? Are you actually connecting with people, or just liking their posts, responding to stories, and watching their lives unfold from a distance?

IKEA Spain dropped a brutal ad in 2018 (go watch it). The gist: most people know more about influencers’ lives than their own families. I’m guilty of it. And yeah, I feel pretty shitty about it.

It’s all connected.

And yet, for something that influences nearly every aspect of modern life, we don’t even have a clear way to define it.

Some call it digital wellness. Others say digital balance or digital wellbeing. The fact that we can’t even agree on a name says a lot—because we’re still treating this like a minor lifestyle tweak instead of one of the biggest challenges of our time.

And when we do try to “solve” it, we half-ass it.

Take screen time tracking apps. You’d think, given how much data our phones collect, we’d be able to see meaningful insights about how our behavior affects us.

But no, Apple’s Screen Time tracking (and corresponding API which every screen time app is built on top of) is damn near useless. It’ll tell you how many hours you wasted, but won’t let you actually do anything with that information.

Want to correlate your screen time with your sleep data from Oura, Whoop, or Apple Watch? Nope.

Want to track how your heart rate changes when you open different apps? Would be so sick, but no shot in hell.

Want to see how your calendar, habits, and screen time data align to show long-term behavioral trends? Lmao good luck.

This isn’t to knock app blockers or the people who build them, many of whom I’m lucky to call friends. They are very important pieces of the puzzle & can be effective in short-term and (sometimes) sustainable change.

But the reality is that most screen time blockers aren’t designed to provide you the level of insight & reflection you need to solve the root problem. When it comes to data, they’re just feeding you an often inaccurate read-only version of your habits over a rolling 4 week period.

The bigger problem is how excessive tech usage quietly shapes your behavior over time. No one wakes up one day and decides to trade in their outdoor runs for more Instagram.

This is the real impact of digital wellness (or lack of it). The more time you spend in a negative digital environment, the more it influences your baseline state of mind. Spend enough time reading about how the world is falling apart, and the world starts to feel hopeless. Spend enough time watching other people’s success, and your own life starts to feel stagnant.

Your content diet becomes your mental diet. More importantly, the long-term effects of excessive-tech don’t just make life feel shorter.

They make life actually shorter.

This is why the common advice of “just use your phone less” doesn’t work. The problem isn’t just time spent on screens. It’s the effect of that time—what you’re exposing yourself to and how that changes your thoughts, emotions, and actions over time.

And fixing this emotional and psychological hardwiring takes much more effort to reverse.

Without your phone as an escape hatch, all the emotions you’ve been suppressing—boredom, loneliness, self-doubt, existential dread—come rushing back.

Most people don’t realize how much of their phone use is emotional self-regulation. We reach for screens to avoid discomfort, awkwardness, or the weight of our own thoughts. Which means fixing this isn’t about limiting screen time, but rather learning to sit with yourself.

This is why app blockers and productivity hacks don’t work in the long run. Real change requires emotional resilience and making key changes to your external environment.

When you spend time outdoors, your body naturally craves healthier food.

When you spend more time moving, your brain naturally shifts into a state that feels less anxious, less scattered.

When you have deep, meaningful conversations in person, social media starts to feel shallow.

This is what digital wellness should actually be about. More life.

People don’t struggle with tech addiction because they love their phones. They struggle because their phones are the most convenient, instantly rewarding option available.

The only way to change that is to make the real world better than the digital one.

This is why digital wellness (or digital balance, or whatever we call it) needs an actual infrastructure. Not just apps that tell you to take a break, but real integrations that show how your tech habits affect your mind, body, and relationships—and give you better alternatives.

Until we start treating this like the fundamental issue it is, we’ll keep seeing the same cycle. feel drained, try cutting back (and somewhat succeed at first on) cutting back, slip back into old habits when boredom or stress kicks in, repeat

Reset45 is my way of changing that.

It’s not a perfect solution. But based on the results from the people I’ve worked with 1:1, it’s already a hell of a lot better than the current alternatives.

If you’re in, reply to this email.

— Randy