Mujica and his 47 seconds of wisdom

“We invented a mountain of superfluos needs. You have to keep buying, throwing away…It´s our lives we are squandering. When I buy something or when you buy it, we are not paying with money. We are paying with the time from our lives we had to spend to earn that money. The difference is that you can´t buy life. Life just goes by. And it`s terrible to waste your life losing your freedom.”

That is what José Mujica said in the viral video called “47 seconds of wisdom”. In less than a minute, the former Uruguayan president condenses what life is nowadays. Most people spend their lives working somewhere that they don´t like. Don´t misinterpret me. I´m not the one who is going to tell you that you should leave your job and change your whole life to be freedom. In my opinion, work is part of our personal development.

This is not a post against the consumerism, it’s about learning how to use your time wisely. We have the idea that time is free, like the testers in the supermarket. What a stupid mistake.

Mujica´s message is quite clear: Every time that you buy something you should’t be thinking how much is it, you should be thinking in time, in hours, in the life that you spent earning that money. Our concepts are wrong, everything is about the money for us but the reality is completely different. You can find the way to earn more but there is nothing that can enable you to gain back your time.

It´s not easy to realise all of this when nobody is going to send you a letter at the end of the month about your time statements. Life goes. You are not going to relive the last half and hour, no even the last five seconds. So, thank you for investing your last ten minutes reading this and remember that everything you do is costing you something.