Some kids get cancer. Some get Asthma. Some get Chicken Pox. Some get Bronchiolitis. Lice. Polio. Diabetes. ADHD.
I got screentime.
Childhood
To this day I still wonder why I did what I did. When I was around ten years old my parents gave me a choice. A PS3 or a PS4 for my birthday. My parents outlined the benefits and deficits to each one. It was a little like this.
For whatever reason I decided to get a PS3.
While most of my friends were interested in first person shooter games like Call of Duty, Fallout, HALO, and Battlefield, my house banned those games because my parents thought I’d prove the Osama allegations true, killing people in real life if I did it virtually. Obsessed with sports I resorted to an exclusive arsenal of Madden 15, MLB the Show 13, FIFA 16, and NBA 2K15.
The rules in my house for when I could use the PS3 were simple. 1 hour MAX on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Cannot play on weekdays. Hell, I couldn’t even watch TV on weekdays. The only other electronic I had in my house was my sisters Ipad, which gradually became mine. I would post musicalies on it every now and then, estatic when a post hit over 10 likes. When I wasn’t posting musicalies, I’d play madden mobile. Life was simple.
Here are some of the classics:
To keep track of how much time I used on the ps3, my mom would set the oven alarm to a one hour timer. After one hour it would start beeping so the whole house knew: Bilal’s time on the PS3 was done for the day. Eventually, I got sick and tired of the system and after two long years, I started cheating.
Every time my mom wasn’t in the kitchen, I’d rush downstairs, add 30 minutes to the timer, and run back upstairs. I guess I got carried away one day and ended up playing for like four hours, so my parents had a really long talk about how one day I was gonna go blind, and that scared me pretty bad for a few days. But I also had another way of cheating
I had a Spanish neighbor move in named Jorge. I’m not very sure how we met and his dad originally thought my name was Balloon, but nonetheless he was my boy. I taught him how to play football, basketball, and even cricket in my driveway. We played outside every single day. I think eventually he started getting tired of my bullshit because I would boss the hell out of him and never agreed to do what he wanted to do. I kind of treated him the way Greg treated Rowley. I feel bad sometimes, but he seems to be doing fine now so it all worked out. I guess.
Jorge’s parents were the best. They were and are some of the most hospitable people I know and it felt like they let him do whatever he wanted. For Jorge, there was no “weekday electronic ban”. His parents also had an infinite supply of cheeseballs. So every now and then, I’d skip over to his house, subtly invite myself in, and we’d run FIFA games until my mom came to his house banging on the door because I technically wasn’t supposed to go inside.
Eventually my parents got a little fed up with my antics and decided to sell the PS3. That was probably the darkest time in my life. Besides Berkeley.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Turns out they only sold the PS3 because they bought me an Xbox. I also got a phone and a laptop that year because I was going into middle school. On my phone, I had to request permission to play games, and youtube got deleted o I didn’t use it much. The same rules applied for the Xbox (1 hour on weekends only) but enforcement was still sketchy so we got by. I lost Jorge (he didn’t die but we just didn’t interact much bc we went to dif schools), but I still had the oven hack.
During the summer of sixth grade (2019), I went rogue. I’d wake up at 4AM and watch the cricket world cup until 11. Then my friends woke up and I’d play Fortnite and Watchdogs (my parents didn’t know I had it) with them until 5PM. My mom got home from work at around 3:30, so she thought I was only playing for an hour and a half. Life was good. This continued the ENTIRE summer.
During seventh grade my dad was concerned I was using my phone a bit too much so he set up the apple screentime thing and I had two hours max on my phone everyday. I was too lazy to set up a spotify account so I would blow away 30 minutes on the busride to school playing music off of Youtube and another 30 minutes for the ride back. Every now and then, I’d sneak behind my dad when he was putting in his phone password and change my screentime settings behind his back. It’d take him 3-5 weeks to find out and then we’d be back at square one.
Pandemic
Then COVID hit. My screentime got out of control. I was playing Xbox in the middle of class with no regard for hygine, the outdoors, or eating. Y’all already know about the Madden leagues from the Trey Alexander post. I was working a full time job managing football teams and school was my side hustle. Then my Algebra teacher sent us an email that hit my house like Hiroshima.
oops.
I know this makes me look like a bad student. Trust me I wasn’t. I was the type of kid to cry after getting a 95 because I didn’t get a 100. I just deadass didn’t even know I had to do Algebra because all the classes became dead.
When my parents got this email, their reaction was bad. Really bad. When I got on Xbox a week later to play my Madden game I got jump scared with this.
I found this from some random online so I guess some other kid had the same problem as me. This “my circle” proceeded to make my life hell for the next 10 months. At 11PM the wifi got cut off, and my Xbox was on lockdown. I had to retire from all my madden leagues and I would break down in tears. I even started showering.
But I was a fighter. A warrior. Apple implemented the fingerprint unlock for the IPhone and I found the perfect loophole.
Muslims pray five times a day. For those unfamiliar, there is, for lack of a better word, a “position” during the prayer where you sit with your index finger lifted and recite “tashahhud”. Here’s a pic to demonstrate.
I would sit by my dad while he prayed and wait until he lifted his finger. Then, like a swiss army knife, I struck. Lighting quick, I inserted the home button under his finger and boom. Unlocked. I deleted all the screentime limits and scampered back upstairs and continued playing. Of course, he would realize fairly quickly what I was doing, but he couldn’t stop me because he couldn’t break his prayer. So this cycle continued until, a few months later, he took the fingerprint off his phone. I now realize I could’ve just put my fingerprint on his phone, but I wasn’t that intelligent back then. This continued until early 2021.
With my Xbox under lock I had only one device left. My laptop. I spent hours upon hours on my laptop and then my dad shut that down too. He couldn’t put a time limit on it because I “needed it for school”, so instead he gave me infinite time with one catch. My laptop disconnects from WI-FI at 11PM.
But that wasn’t gonna stop me. I’m resilient. I’m a fighter. And I NEEDED to play midnight monopoly with my friends. So everyday in January, I snuck into my parents room, snatched my dads work laptop and spent the next three hours online.
One day, my dad tucked his laptop well under his bed. 11 struck, and I went down to retrieve it. I crawled under the bed in the pitch black darkness and I heard a creak. He woke up. It was over. 14 years of such a fun life. I was gonna miss my Madden friends. I was gonna miss Chuy’s. I was gonna miss out on sixty more years. I was dead.
Heart pounding and out of breath, I stayed under the bed. I had the urge to sneeze, but I had a bigger urge to stay alive. The next fifteen minutes were pure silence. My dad had been in the bathroom for 10 minutes, and my mom now woke up. I was dead.
But then after what felt like two more hours I heard a flush. Then I heard my mom get out of bed and go to the bathroom. And as soon as the bathroom door shut. I flew. I went upstairs as fast and as quiet as possible and sprinted straight to my room.
Some win the SuperBowl. Some win the finals. Some win an Oscar. Some win the TOC. I won the laptop. For the first time, I knew Allah was real. I made it alive in the most unlikely of unlikely situations. Undetected. Well, undetected for twenty four hours. I tried again the next day. I failed.
Today marks the three year anniversary of my freedom from “screentime”. The disease I escaped.