paid work is voluntary servitude #5

This will be my final entry reflecting on the performance of the presentation. On the whole the seemed to go very well, we had no problems with the technology in showing our power point, everyone knew when it was their turn to speak, and it seemed that there weren’t any mistakes apart from the odd struggle to pronounce certain lines which is something expected in many respects.
I was happy with my own performance; I felt that I spoke clearly with plenty of volume and I gave eye contact to my audience. But, I could not do my speech from memory, there seems to be this nagging mental state when giving a presentation which makes your mind go blank, because you’re trying to explain something so everyone can understand and to do this within the allotted time, there is a tendency to want to stick to a script. But in this mental state which seems to come over it’s as if instead of explaining something through progressive thinking, instead I felt as if my mind was blank waiting for the lines to just pop into my head. Because of this I had to refer to my flash cards more than should be necessary. Before the presentation when I was practicing I could do it off by heart, but in the presentation situation I didn’t feel confident enough to be able to explain coherently within the specified time without referring. This same mental state was operating for questions too, I felt my answer adequately described my position but I needed time to get it across. Meena posed the question (roughly) of what was the difference between paid work and work which was freely chosen?, as we might not have clearly explained the difference between the social contract and acting out of custom. I was able to use my example of an engineer in my previous blog to show that people who pursue their interest as a job are volunteering as a paid job will provide certain opportunities to reach a desired goal which might not be possible to achieve as an individual. Dave helped me in answering this question with an example which reflected the opposite to my example, jobs which do not really improve a human being or help in achieving a desired goal like collecting rubbish or turning a stop and go sign. The point of our presentation was to give a general account of the question, which Dave mentioned and which I touched on in my previous blog. All in all the presentation and questions went fine, where our perspectives had some rational weight behind them which we were able to explain and expand upon coherently.