SS_09/14 → Notes from Conversas Vadias #9 – Agostinho da Silva in conversation with students
Notes from Conversas Vadias #9
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with students
Originally broadcast by RTP on 3 May 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.
There are questions that only become important after you’ve stopped trying to optimise everything.
One of them appeared halfway through this conversation.
Life is also for wasting years.
I smiled when I heard it.
Not because it’s romantic.
Because it feels almost forbidden to say out loud.
We’re taught that every year should produce something.
A promotion.
A degree.
A company.
A measurable improvement.
A better version of ourselves.
Agostinho quietly rejects that entire logic.
Not because he is against work.
But because he is against reducing life to utility.
Some years will produce visible results.
Others won’t.
That doesn’t make them failures.
Sometimes, what looks like wasted time is simply invisible growth.
Another student asks about education.
His answer is unexpectedly radical.
It is absurd to teach a child what they do not want to learn.
At first, it sounds irresponsible.
Until you realise he’s making a distinction between learning and compliance.
We often mistake obedience for education.
Children memorise.
Pass exams.
Receive certificates.
Yet many leave school without ever discovering what genuinely captures their curiosity.
Agostinho imagines something completely different.
A second school.
Not instead of the existing one.
Beside it.
A place for those willing to risk having no employment.
I found that sentence extraordinary.
Today, we’d probably call it entrepreneurship.
Or independent research.
Or simply creative work.
He called it something much simpler.
Freedom.
Freedom to discover whether your life belongs to a job…
…or to something you haven’t invented yet.
Towards the end of the conversation, he says something I’ve found myself returning to more than once.
Utopian doesn’t mean impossible.
It simply means it doesn’t exist yet.
That’s such a subtle shift.
We often dismiss ideas because they don’t fit today’s reality.
Agostinho reminds us that today’s reality was yesterday’s impossibility.
Every meaningful invention.
Every political right.
Every scientific breakthrough.
Every work of art.
Every civilisation.
At some point, they all belonged to the category of things that didn’t yet exist.
Perhaps the role of imagination isn’t escaping reality.
Perhaps it’s expanding it.
And maybe that’s why life also needs room for wasted years.
Because the future has never emerged from people who were busy optimising every minute of the present.
Original source
Conversas Vadias — Episode 9 → https://www.fernandomoreira.me/conversas-vadias-episodio-9-com-estudantes/
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with students.
Broadcast by RTP on 3 May 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.