As soon as I got home from a trip to visit my family I promptly fell asleep for sixteen hours straight, waking only once to pee and take a bite of an apple. I have spent so many years around people who are intensely afraid of everything I can hardly bear it anymore and was totally drained. Humans are an incredibly fearful animal. Perhaps it is our position halfway between the prey and the predators. Perhaps it is our superstitions. Perhaps there really is much to be afraid of.

Fears that plague us range from the rational such as bodily danger, germs, or other humans, to that which is irrational such as God, Aliens, and homosexuals. Since I got an excess of sleep and finally recovered from my trip through a gauntlet of both rational and irrational fear I found the inspiration to stay up and make chocolate chip cookies. Such treats are exceptionally dear to me since for a decade I had to avoid such things due to a serious allergy to wheat gluten which would shut down my immune system and trigger debilitating sinus infections and catastrophic stomachaches. If you think that is a bit melodramatic you probably haven’t spent half a day in the bathroom wishing God would just kill you now instead of enduring another second of it. I was always disapproving of parents who withhold treats from their children, but after my exhaustive experience of both the physical and mental health benefits of eating such things made from good ingredients which don’t cause the aforementioned harms, which only come from specific types of harmful ingredients and not the food itself, I find myself extremely frustrated and saddened by the generation of parents who do not give their children ice cream or cookies before bed because withholding these things actually causes physical and mental harm to their children. Through the entirety of my childhood my father, who has always been exceptionally fit and handsome, ate some form of dessert every single night of the week, from ice cream to cookies to pie and cake it was a rare night indeed that he didn’t go to bed without some heavy indulgence in sugar though we, as children, only got to partake a few nights a week, which is still more than many of my nieces and nephews are getting.

Many parents cite the administration of sugar as a stimulant for energy and thus delay for bedtime, which means they as parents do not get their much anticipated nightly break from the stress of yelling and screaming at their children. First, if you are exhausted by parenting at the end of the day you have two problems—1) you are likely not producing enough pregnenolone, which is our master hormone, and thus daily activity expends what little energy you have and 2) you are projecting your perceived insecurities, fears, and failures onto your children and thus expending far more energy than is necessary to parent. Both of these things can be addressed by therapies in my book, but most importantly sugar is not the promoter of wild and rambunctious behavior nor the inducer of illness that is so popularly propagandized. Sugar as a chemical actually makes our cells work better, which is sometimes why the introduction of it can lead to an increase in energy, and is certainly why we crave it, though this typically happens because of a deficit throughout the day which results in a rebound of production due to the previous deficiency. Fructose, which is in sugar, is an absolutely necessary nutrient for very specific pathways in the human body without which we cannot properly develop. Fructosephosphates are forms of fructose which are converted by our body in pathways which do not run without it, such as fructose 1,6-bisphosphate which is used in the pathway of gluconeogenesis, for example. Healthy bodies can produce some of their own fructose during a deficiency, but not enough to run a very healthy metabolic rate and certainly not after passing into various stages of aging (even as young as mid-twenties in many cases). This is the reason we crave sugar, not because it is a temptation but because our body finds it medicinal. Of course, unrefined forms are much more healthy than refined white sugar because they come with additional vitamins and minerals, but I still use powdered sugar on my german pancakes because it tastes fucking awesome, and some refined sugar in food is not going to be harmful in the least. The other reason kids start raging after you give them sugar is because you are typically giving them foods which have other agitating and irritating allergens in them. I do not understand parents who freak out about sugar but then feed their children shitty foods with inflammatory and allergenic gluten, reduced iron, partially hydrogenated oils, soy, and some seriously toxic preservatives and emulsifiers like carrageenan which is shown to potentiate the harmful effects of endotoxin on the body (endotoxin is a potentially toxic but common byproduct of gastrointestinal bacteria which contributes to disease when it enters the blood stream). Parents strangely never seem to notice how their kids conk out quickly after a big dose of sugar—after slipping my nieces and nephews many pieces of high quality taffy they were joys before bed and slept through the entire night though they are known otherwise to wake frequently. If any of my siblings really wanted to sleep the night they would feed their kids well-made ice cream without additives before bed. This would also, subsequently, assist their bodies in growing well and healthy and become more resistant to stress and disease. Do you feel like causing anarchy after a bowl of ice cream? No. That’s absurd and you’re absurd for speaking different from your own experience.

The most unfair burden that children must bear are adult fears of themes which are irrational. A vengeful God who hates those who make mistakes, the extinction of the human race by calamity or our own hand, the overthrowing of government by nefarious forces, the existence (or not) of aliens who may or may not come to invade our lovely planet. Fears of these kinds show incredible ignorance in the face of plain and obvious facts. God does not hate anyone, and heartily assists us in our struggle to be happy and healthy if we only sit still for a moment and listen to what he is saying, which is certainly not to go around proclaiming that everyone else is wrong and destined for hell. In my experience God has always come to my rescue, even when I was trying very hard to avoid it. Worrying about human extinction is by extension a problem with religion, which has corrupted our understanding of who we are and why we are here and the unfathomable lineage which has preceded each of us, and silly since you aren’t going to be alive anyway in even a hundred years. From the dawn of terrestrial life until this very moment there has been an animal on this earth which was your ancestor. Even though you pass away or events do occur which disrupt the populations of life on this planet it will continue to exist as it always has (always in regard to our own powers of comprehension). Obviously this is not a call for passivity in the face of great problems which have resulted from our collective way of life, but subjecting yourself and especially your family to fears of things which are far greater than the scope of one person’s life is a waste of that life. Yes, aliens do exist but the truth is they are not coming for us. The universe is more than thirteen billion years old—we absolutely cannot comprehend how much time that is, and the only reason we talk about aliens the way we do is because humans are naturally stupid and prejudiced. In the time span of the cosmos countless populations of intelligent life have come and gone, many probably with the ability to travel through time and space (the recent revelations from the pentagon seem to support this). An alien population who can travel the stars will never come to harvest our planet or resources because there is far more of such things orbiting their own or nearby solar systems (for instance there is about fifty times more water elsewhere in our solar system alone than on Earth). Never mind the more obvious fact that creating water or any other element yourself is a far more simple technological accomplishment than interstellar space travel.

Having fears is a natural part of being mortal. But most fears come from focusing too much on other people, things, or events, and not enough time on yourself. When we fear God we tend to treat other people (especially children) with contempt, anger, and impatience, recognizing in them our insecurities which make us feel vulnerable. When we fear calamity and instability we do not understand the dogged persistence of life, nor our own amazing heritage and interconnectedness, but we also probably avoid confronting our own mortality in the process. Fearing immigrants and human aliens is rooted in the misguided perception that our resources are finite, an illusion which results from the sequestering of resources by a limited population of humans rather than a system which secures and redistributes that wealth to balance the effects of greed and competition. Fearing death is always the result of having caused wrongs and hurt in your life which are not yet amended, because death is not actually scary—it’s as natural as birth, sex, and everything else about life and is certainly not the end of you but only for this state of existence. No, fear of death is a fear that you will no longer have a chance to put right the wrongs you have done, no more chance to make things better and atone for the hurt you have caused. If you find such a thing to be difficult to do you have only not learned how to properly deal with your fears, mistakes, and shortcomings, nor how to properly make an amends. Yes, this is another article about the personal and fear inventories which are in my book—I find this season brings out the occasion for their use more than any other time—and they can help walk you through the steps necessary to resolve such issues and not just come to terms with the reality of life, but to embrace and enjoy it, which in turn leads to a life where fear is replaced by peace and thus a lot more time and energy to make things like chocolate chip cookies.