Offline is the New Luxury

Author

Randy Ginsburg
April 30, 2025

Welcome to the 23 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2300+ smart, curious people trying to survive the internet with their brains intact, by subscribing here:

Before we get into it…

If you’re in the NYC area, I’m hosting another Kanso Unplugged experience on May 7th. No phones or distractions. Just great people and thoughtful conversations in a beautiful cocktail bar in East Village. You can grab your tickets here. 

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet that caught my eye:

If you’re a frequent reader of my work, you’ll know that I often draw parallels between digital wellness and our more familiar struggles with physical fitness and nutrition. I’ve also written at length about the inequality gaps that recent technological advances tend to create, both in knowledge and income.

What’s happening with screen time today mirrors, almost exactly, the historical arc of food consumption. For most of human history, being overweight was a signal of prosperity. Only the wealthy could afford the luxury of excess calories. Thinness was not fashionable, but rather a marker of poverty.

Today, the inverse is true. Processed foods are cheap and omnipresent. Organic, nutrient-dense options are costly. Discipline around food (and the visible signs of it) has become a modern form of status signaling, with fitness and careful eating becoming aspirational markers for a class of people who can afford not only the food but the time and resources to structure their lives around it.

As the tweet suggests, I strongly believe digital consumption is following the same trajectory. Soon enough, being "chronically online" and consuming brain rot will mark you as lower status. The ultimate luxury will be digital balance, a refined content diet, and a primarily ‘offline’ life.

Tbh, it’s already starting.

Cigarettes provide the clearest historical roadmap for how this kind of status inversion unfolds. For decades, smoking was glamorized. Movie stars smoked. Doctors smoked. Intellectuals smoked. Lighting a cigarette was a small but powerful act of cultural belonging and even a symbol of freedom. 

Then suddenly, it wasn’t.

Smoking became synonymous with poor health, bad breath, premature aging, and yellow teeth. What once looked cool started to lose its status and attractiveness.

The shift didn’t come from public service campaigns or health statistics alone, though those played a role. It changed because the cultural meaning flipped.

It didn’t matter how common it was: once it became unattractive, it collapsed.

We’re heading toward a similar moment with our society’s tech habits. What once felt normal is slowly starting to be viewed as embarrassing and unattractive.

The dinner guest who can't stop checking their phone under the table isn’t multi-tasking, but rather revealing a lack of attention, care, presence, and self-regulation. The same goes for the person who feels the need to broadcast every private moment to Instagram, signaling that without an audience, the experience feels incomplete.

On the surface, these may seem like tiny social annoyances. But over time, they erode the core traits we instinctively look for in others in friendship, work, and romance: focus, curiosity, restraint, discernment.

And while individuals may come to these realizations on their own, history shows that lasting cultural change rarely comes from quiet reflection. It tends to come all at once.

At some point, the discomfort compounds. The cracks become too visible. And then, something tips.

Shifts of this scale usually need a cluster of unmistakable moments happening close together. A high-profile tragedy that brings everything into focus. A prominent influencer whose life unravels under the pressure of constant exposure. A surge in health issues directly tied to screen addiction. A mass conversation about the neurological toll of living inside the attention economy.

We’ve seen this pattern before. For cigarettes, it took a cocktail of regulation, death, health data, media outbursts, and youth disinterest to finally puncture the cultural narrative.

For digital addiction, we have not yet had our definitive moment, but oh baby, there are signs.

Just to list a few…

  • Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, called for warning labels on social media, framing it as a public health threat tied to a loneliness epidemic.

  • Australia has banned social media for kids under sixteen.

  • Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and his surrounding media tour kicked off a massive cultural conversation about what phones are doing to kids' brains.

  • Celebrities like Tom Holland and Jonah Hill have stepped back from social media, while creators like Emma Chamberlain have periodically pulled back from YouTube, all citing burnout, addiction, and the toll of being constantly online.

Among younger generations, the earliest signs of cultural reversal are already visible. On TikTok, you’ll find videos romanticizing guys who stay off social media, painting them as more mysterious, grounded, and confident just because they are not caught up in the noise.

@zozoschott

I pray for this every night 😌

The tech elite’s behavior provides another revealing signal. Steve Jobs famously did not let his children use iPads. Bill Gates forbid his children to have phones until age 14. I attended an event last year where Randi Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg’s sister and early Facebook builder) was highly vocal on monitoring her children’s screen time.

Those who best understand the addictive pull of digital technology are the ones most eager to shield their families from it.

Even at the aesthetic and prestige level, the cracks are appearing. Kids are switching back to flip phones. Dumbphones are all the rage. The Minimal Phone launched last week to the tune of 1.2m impressions and many comments with high-purchase intent.

Physical products like these are an intentional status signaI. Digital absence, rather than digital omnipresence, is becoming the ultimate flex.

None of these shifts, taken individually, would amount to much. But together they suggest a quiet reordering of the status hierarchy.

And when the wealthy, educated, and influential begin treating something as toxic, history shows that cultural norms do not take long to follow.

For any of this to result in a true behavioral shift, however, the change must tap into something far older and deeper than rational understanding.

It must reach our primal instincts, and judging by the examples above, it’s starting to do so.

Our brains evolved in environments where social acceptance was not a nice-to-have. It was life or death. To be rejected by the tribe was to die alone, and this evolutionary wiring still governs our behavior today.

It’s simple. We crave acceptance from the group. We crave attraction, sex, and acceptance from romantic partners. Anything that threatens either sets off our monkey brains in panic.

This is why most people don’t exercise primarily to extend their lifespan or reduce the risk of heart disease. They exercise to look better naked. Weight loss works as a motivator because it is visible. It advertises discipline, control, youth, and sex. These things are attractive because they’re easy to see. They’re legible.

Digital overuse, by contrast, corrodes things that are less visible but arguably more valuable: attention span, ambition, composure, originality. These traits are less superficial and take longer to notice in a person, but one could easily argue are far more important to long-term tribal acceptance, healthy sexual relationships, and broader happiness.

Because in the end, nobody wants to date, hire, or hang out with someone who’s mentally somewhere else. People don’t make real long-term habitual change because they read about reducing screen time and feel inspired. They change because someone they want to impress or get closer to notices their behavior and finds it unappealing.

My gut tells me that society’s digital behavior will change not because people suddenly grasp the abstract dangers (although the data will help), but because social penalties will become unavoidable.

The dad who always has his phone in hand starts paying attention when his son stops asking to play.

The friend glued to TikTok at dinner starts to notice when the invites dry up.

The guy taking pictures of his food at dinner won’t change out of concern for “mindfulness”, but he’ll sure as hell pay attention when his date excuses herself early and never texts back.

That is how it always happens. Quietly at first. Then brutally obvious.

Unlike nutrition and physical health, status tied to digital wellness will not just be about how you look. It will be about how you think. The people who can control their inputs will control their outcomes. They will choose depth over brainrot. Signal over noise. Stillness over constant stimulation.

They will have the ability to stay bored, stay focused, stay selective.

Meanwhile, everyone else will be drowning in algorithmic junk food, not because they want to be, but because they will not know how to do anything else.

The new status economy is already here. Most people just have not realized it yet.

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

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