My dad and I observed my 3-year-old tearing up the living room — jumping on the couch like he was getting paid for it and running the length of the room enough times to count as a workout — while drinking coffee.
“Sugar's working,” I remarked between sips.
“What do you mean?” my dad asked.
I looked at him incredulously. The sudden burst of manic energy was clearly the result of us just having fed him an inadvisable amount of cake. Somehow, my dad has never realized that ingesting sugar has an observable effect, on toddlers especially.
The thing about sugar, though, is that it burns bright. Your body absorbs it quickly and easily, and you get a sudden, intense rush of energy. But it doesn't last long. When the sugar crash hits, your energy levels are actually worse than they were before.

The modern world seems to increasingly focus on providing you with small, easily digestible content. Twitter's microblogging became more popular than reading long-form blog posts. TikTok flooded millions of smartphones with an app that is essentially malware because they became so good at always throwing you the next morsel of content. Instagram and YouTube soon followed suit.