Speaking in terms of tech addiction, there are tools and strategies out there to manage. Anti-engagement tools you might call them. The "Digital Wellbeing" app on Android can be used to limit certain apps, such as to one hour per day. The unhook.app extension neuters YouTube's engagement by disabling things like suggested videos. I have also set a Windows Task Scheduler task to run shutdown /s /hybrid /t 60 in the evening. Having a reminder of goals to curb irresponsible behavior can often be enough to curb them.
In a perfect world I'd be able to set a weekly calorie limit. Charge me double the cost and send the overage to the charity of my choice for any food over the limit.
A government body limiting who can buy food isn't really a good idea, so it only works in utopia. It could work for non-essentials though.
I order from a service that provides me nutritionist-built meals every day; in the morning, I get exactly 2000kcal spread out across 3 meals and 1 snack. I also drink protein yogurt reaching around 2350kcal so that's my daily intake (and I guess calorie limit) with balanced macro and micronutrients.
What this means is that I am aware that anything above these meals is too much for me. Do I still do it? Yes, but I have an unhealthy relationship with food.
What if you could opt for a custodian, and the designation can't change very often (like open enrollment)?
Give a trusted friend the right to set your calorie limit, and if it doesn't work out, try a different friend next week--but you can only change it between 10AM and 2PM on Mondays.
Yeah I could see maybe a credit card sort of offering with these rules. I don't think credit cards get that granular level of data however. Then I would only have to commit to only carrying around that card.
Yeah, let's not hand that sort of data to the credit card companies. It might be a good use case for homomorphic encryption--where the transaction processor computes a go/no-go result without knowing why (and then you scan a QR code and decrypt on your device).
I was thinking of having it decoupled from payments, sort of a more customizable replacement for the ID-checks that we currently do when buying alcohol. I think you could do zero-knowledge trickery to avoid the privacy problems.
But then again, an API for a third party to cut off your access to resources might be too juicy of an abuse-enabler to be worth building.