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I stayed up till 6.00am this morning, preparing for a presentation I had to give at 10.35am. With less than three solid hours of sleep, I went to class, passed out the handouts and started presenting in my “I’m too sleepy to think” version of Japanese, but I miraculously managed to get my points across to the others in class.

Today, I presented some of the basic concepts set by Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi in some of his works, with an emphasis on his most famous work, The Great Transformation. I found his concepts very interesting in the sense that he opposed traditional economists who side “force” people to either accept Marxism or Liberalism. Polanyi, in a sense optimistic of humanity (in my opinion), says that it is wrong to allow economics to be the deciding factor on the way a country is run, and it is wrong to assume that the economy of a country and the market of a country have to run in the same system (which touches on his famous concept of “embeddedness”, which stressed how economics is embedded into the culture and society, rather than the other way round). He says that it is possible to strike a balance between letting the market freely run itself, and to be flexible enough to allow a counterbalancing force to make sure things are in check. These thoughts became the foundation of what is known as Economic Democracy.

I was getting towards the end of my last-minute preparations for the presentation at around 5.00am when I suddenly began to feel very bitter. This bitterness only became heavier, as the light from the world outside seeping through my window got brighter. This bitterness became thicker as the din raised by a conference of crows scowering for something to eat outside my window was amplified. I’d felt this bitterness many times before, but it was different this time. Could it have been the lack of sleep because of this presentation in particular, or was it a reflection of a much larger anxiety I secretly (or unsecretly) worry about?

Regardless, I went to class and presented my findings. I spoke for 50 minutes without any interruptions, just using the nods of some of the heads of those listening as a gauge to my pace and performance. At the end of it all, and after giving my opinions and findings (even going as far as to allude to similarities between the thoughts of Polanyi, Marx and Ibn Khaldun) the professor announced to the class that I had done a good job presenting.

And just as I had all this anxiety welling up from the night before, the “bitterness” suddenly transformed into happiness in that instant. I suddenly felt that I wanted to take up research as a profession and do it forever.

Are we that easily swayed into making big decisions on little episodes such as this? I wonder.