NEED TO KNOW
- Influencer Santina Rizzi, 26, swaps her iPhone for a $50 burner phone every Friday at 6 p.m. and doesn’t switch back until Sunday evening
- The experiment initially left her anxious about everything she might be missing, until one realization changed the way she looked at being constantly connected
- Six weekends later, Rizzi says the switch has made her more present and even changed how friends have to communicate and make plans with her
Every Friday at 6 p.m., Santina Rizzi puts away the device that can summon nearly her entire life with a tap: her texts, email, social media, camera, maps, music and even her wallet.
For the next 48 hours, it’s the 26-year-old influencer with a $50 burner phone, a few trusted contacts and, as she joked in a TikTok documenting the ritual, her Bananagrams “against the f—ing world.”
“The first 24 hours of the first weekend was really challenging because I was anxious about what was happening on my iPhone while I wasn’t looking at it — texts, comments, emails, etc.,” Rizzi tells PEOPLE. But when she finally checked it that Sunday, she found her phone was “dry as f—,” a funny discovery that came with a more serious realization: “The world keeps spinning without me monitoring every microsecond of it.”
Now Rizzi makes most of her weekends a “burner phone weekend,” an experiment that grew from a plan to help a friend who had posted about feeling overwhelmed by social media. Rizzi offered to take her on a surprise, phone-free friend date around Miami, and although that outing never happened, an upcoming group trip to Fort Pierce gave her another opportunity to try disconnecting.
She bought burner phones for the trip, hoping the devices would make it easier to convince her friends to put away their smartphones. The group included five influencers, people who Rizzi says “literally LIVE on their phones” — yet she says everyone walked away feeling satisfied and fulfilled by the experience.
Since then, the burner has become part of Rizzi’s weekends, with only her best friends and family members getting the number. Her mom is less enthusiastic about the arrangement because she can no longer track her daughter, while Rizzi says her friends mostly respect it and find the whole thing funny.
There is another change, too: texting on the burner is inconvenient enough that long conversations aren’t particularly appealing. “If someone wants to talk to me, they gotta make a plan to see me,” Rizzi says.
Without an iPhone waiting to be checked, Rizzi says her attention stays with whatever is actually in front of her, whether that is friends, family, arts and crafts or a show. The experience has also made her recognize what she describes as a “faint anxiety” that can accompany having constant access to texts, comments, emails, news and social media.
Of course, stripping a smartphone out of everyday life has also revealed just how much one small device handles. Rizzi uses digital and film cameras for photos, listens to the radio for music, carries cash or a credit card to pay and, when she needs directions, relies on her memory, asks a stranger or calls her mom to have her navigate over the phone.
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Research is even simpler: “I just don’t,” she jokes. Those inconveniences haven’t convinced her to quit, and Rizzi says knowing she will disconnect on Friday evenings has even pushed her to be more productive during the workweek.
Rizzi doesn’t think everyone needs to buy another phone to get the same benefits, pointing to iPhone settings that can restrict apps and recommending that people begin with just 24 hours offline. What matters to her is creating a period when checking is no longer an option.
“I promise that anyone who tries it will love it,” Rizzi says. “Once Friday evening comes, the weekend is just for me, my friends [and] family, and that work will have to be done between Monday and Friday.”