You have almost certainly moved before, like from one house to another. If your experience is anything like mine, what happens is that you start with the big stuff, such as beds, cabinets, the dining room table, the chairs, and so forth. Only a few hours into the move, you look around and figure that you’ve made so much progress so fast, that this thing will be over in no time!

But as the moving progresses, things begin to slow down exponentially. You pack clothes into boxes. You start to clear out the garage. And then, God help you, you start to go through all the bathroom and kitchen drawers. The things you’re packing getting smaller and more multitudinous. Plus, whereas early in the process you neatly and carefully labeled each box with tremendous detail, by the 50th box you’ll just writing “STUFF” on the side with a thick black Sharpie. The point is that what seemed like it would be done swiftly is actually taking forever, because the clearing-away of things takes longer and longer, so much so that you eventually figure, screw it, I can just leave some of this junk behind.