Transcription
Translator: Emilia Sotres
Reviewer: Larisa Esteche
How are you all? (Good) Don't interrupt me too much because we have a clock here that's running, and it's ten minutes, and if I go over, there are snipers on every corner. They shoot me, they kill me. That wouldn't be cool. So cooperate with me, please. I'm Sofía Niño de Rivera, and I'm here to talk to you about what was the hardest thing for me to learn when, six years ago, I decided to quit my job, sell my car, and become a comedian. And what was the hardest thing for me to learn was how to have free time. I'm going to explain why.
When I was little, I used to play at being an adult, like all children do, and I played "house," and I played at being a teacher, and I played at being a secretary, and all my games had something in common: I imagined being an adult, but I was always grumpy, stressed, and in a hurry. Those were my games. Because that's how I thought adult life was, and well... yes, right? (Laughter) And so, when I played house, I played the mom who scolded all the kids and punished them, and the teacher scolded all the students and punished them, and the secretary, well, I slept with my boss, right? And things like that. (Laughter)
So I realized that from a young age, we are taught that what matters in your life is that all the education you have, and so on, is so that when you grow up you work, earn money, have a family, and support yourself. Not to have fun, not to do anything else, but to be an adult, which is what it's all about. And so, I had a tremendous urgency to be an adult, and I already wanted to start working because I saw my dad leave the house super early, return super tired, sleep incredibly well, because he didn't have energy for anyone else, and I wanted to know how that felt, right?
So I started working, from my first semester of university, if we don't count my other jobs, which were, well, washing the car and carrying my mom's bag for which they paid me like five pesos. Don't have children so they can carry your bags, please, I grew up my whole childhood with: "Sweetie, pass it to me," all the time. Don't do it. And so, I worked as a creative writer, as a copy trainee, in an advertising agency, well, in several. Copy trainee means: 'copy' is writing and drafting, and 'trainee' is earning five hundred pesos a month and being ignored for six years, right? Basically.
So I started working there and was very excited because I was already an adult, I didn't have to pretend anymore. I was going to a real office, with real people, with secretaries who actually slept with their bosses and then... (Laughter) I already felt incredible. But then all of that started to crumble because I realized that my creativity, which was what mattered most to me when working in advertising, was really stifled by a brief that told me: "You have to think this way and create this way, and I will decide if your idea is worthwhile or not." I was working for brands, selling them products I wouldn't consume, with ideas I wasn't proud of. Basically, I was living in a mistaken freedom. All the office workers will understand this type of freedom. When there's a long weekend, for example, when you say: "Oh! I'm not working Monday." "I'm free." No, you're not. (Laughter) When they tell you that vacation time is coming.
So, basically, life is constantly telling us, especially in the lives of office workers, they are telling us when to slack off. When it's okay to slack off. When it's okay to go on vacation, when it's not wrong to watch TV, it can only be Saturday and Sunday because during the week, unless it's at night, you can't watch TV at 11 a.m. because, what a slacker, right? And yes, honestly, yes. But... (Laughter) I realized, in reality, that I didn't have freedom and that I wasn't the owner of my time, that I lived off the free time I had afterward. So then I decided to quit my job, sell my car, and become a comedian.
Why a comedian? Because for me, comedy is the best way to communicate with the world. It has been that way my entire life. The only teachers I recognize or remember from school are the ones who made me laugh. Anyone in my life, those who make me laugh, those I sleep with, yes, all of them, are the ones who make me laugh. (Laughter) So comedy is super important to me, and that's why I decided my life would be about speaking to the world through comedy. In a country that has the best humor in the world. For starters, we laugh at death. What country does that? Damn crazy Mexicans. And it's incredible. So I decided to do that.
And what was the hardest thing for me to do wasn't quitting everything to do that. It wasn't performing in theaters or bars where no one was going to see me. They were going to see something else, and I was there in the meantime. They didn't pay me. My first comedy payment was in a little hat where they put incense, a rubber ball, and candy. That was also my fault for doing it in La Condesa, damn hippies. But that's how it was. (Laughter) And so I realized that what was hardest for me wasn't that. It wasn't suddenly thinking that I had already failed because every time I got on stage, no one laughed. It wasn't that. What was hardest for me was having free time. Because the people in my life, both from offices and at home, had been the owners of my time, and I didn't know how to have free time. I could go to the movies on a Monday at 1 p.m., but I didn't because I felt guilty because life told me and society told me that you shouldn't do that. You have to go to a job, go to an office, earn a salary, be someone in society for us to value you and think you are successful.
So, I had to learn to slack off, basically. Seriously! I had to learn to enjoy my time. I had everything very separated. I thought that my time and my work were completely different things. That what I enjoyed was different from how I worked. And on the contrary, comedy is about life. I had to live to keep writing. So I realized that what scared people the most when I said I was a comedian, the first thing they asked me was: "Hey, and do you actually live off that?" That was the first thing they asked me. Because money is always an impediment. But you won't ask that of another profession. You won't go to a lawyer and say, "Do you actually live off that?" because we assume they steal enough, right? (Laughter) You won't ask a doctor, "Do you actually live off that?" because they charge us 1,500 pesos to tell us: "It's stress." (Laughter) But when it comes to things like this, you do ask if they live off it because people are very afraid of not being able to do something they like and also earn money from it. I'm not going to tell you how much I earn, I mean, I didn't get paid for this, but I'm not going to tell you how much I earn. But I earn more in an hour than I used to earn in a month in advertising.
And then I realized that what scares people the most... They would tell me, "But what do you do all day?" And I wanted to lie because I felt guilty about it: "Nothing, I didn't do anything, dude, I didn't do anything." "I mean, I was in pajamas, I didn't shower, I didn't do anything, man." Because people look at you like: "Hmm, no, yes, you're not okay, you're not doing well, huh, no, no, no." (Laughter) But we have to change the concept of doing nothing, of free time. Time is not free or enslaved, stop saying you have 'free time.' We have time. That's it. It doesn't have to be free from the slavery you live all the time, and now I can finally do what I like. We have to learn to be owners of our own time. That the office doesn't dictate it, that your parents or your boyfriends don't dictate it.
If companies really put the same effort, within a company, into telling people: "You have to work and also do recreational things," the working world would be completely different. I'm not telling you: quit, become comedians, because most of you wouldn't be funny, but we could start having happy people at work, who don't have to go home afterward and say: "Now, I'm going to read." "Now, I'm going to do something I like." So that your life isn't divided. That it's your full time.
I once went to give a stand-up workshop at a company, the most bureaucratic I've ever known so far, to people who do programming, who do other super boring things that I never understood. And they were the least funny people in the world, basically. So, I gave them the stand-up workshop, and what struck me most was that they didn't know each other, but they saw each other every day. They didn't know that one was a widower, who had two daughters, had to go to school every day, fix problems related to that, and work. They didn't know that another had a teenage son who made his life impossible, as all teenagers do. They didn't know. Because inside companies, they live like robots. And I don't want everyone to quit and become a painter, writer, and so on, because we need lawyers, doctors, and boring people. We need them. (Laughter) But we need people like this, happy. People like this... Thank you for trying to start applause. (Laughter) (Applause)
We need each of you, if you are in a company, to be able to tell your boss or you being bosses: "It's Wednesday, I'm fed up, I can't think, I have six meetings waiting for me, and I can't. I'll be right back, I'm going to slack off." (Laughter) Why do offices like Google exist, which have hammocks and ping pong? Also, Google people, come on, they have everything, basically, in there. (Laughter) Why? Because they know that people who are happy and who use their time as recreational and work time are much more productive. I had never worked so hard until I became a comedian. I was pretending to be super busy at the agency. But it's true. What I'm getting at is: We need to learn to slack off, productively, so that it works in favor of our spirit. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you.