In each of these spheres we know what needs to be done, yet one does not have time to do everything one would like to do or perhaps even ought to do.

Once bowed to said hard reality, one instinctively optimises, balances, does not take the eye from the ball. Now we must sort wheat and chaff. Suddenly much that seemed wheat, or goodness or warm home made apple pie appears strangely parasitic. They are become as highwaymen to rob you of the capacity to cope with the more pressing. Home made yields to mac ‘n’ cheese. You begin to ponder why you were ever enamored of them. But this state alone is insufficient.

The secret is in knowing which of the formerly perceived wheat and goodness to save and which suddenly appears chaff. You expend your last sensibilities upon your accounts, your final energy of the day on budgets. If mice eat the ungleaned grains, if mold is growing in the bathtub grout, so be it. You’ve gone as far as you can go.

And in time you accumulate knowledge of this truth and do it mental winnowing without much thought, at which point it passes for wisdom, a sort of third-rate magic, and others cannot fathom, “How do you manage to do that…?”

Slaving Bob Cratchit works hard but it is cunning Scrooge who buys the goose.