FORWARD

        The genesis of this project was, in all honesty, a Reddit thread. I can't find it anymore, but there was a post on r/bestof about the abundance of optimization that goes into creating a single Dorito, and it sent me down a rabbithole from which I still haven't quite emerged.
        I wanted to know where else in the engineering of our consumer lives, and to what degree, such tactics have been applied. This book is a byproduct of that search.
        Pursuing the search, I wandered through Julio Cortázar’s labyrinthine book Hopscotch, where I came across this passage that pretty much sums up what I'm looking for.
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        “Every reunion of international managers, of men-of-science, every new artificial satellite, hormone, or atomic reactor shatters a little more these false hopes. The Kingdom will be made of plastic, it’s a fact. And it’s not like the world has to become an orwellian or huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delicious world, by the measure of its inhabitants, without a single mosquito or a single illiterate, with hens of enormous stature and probably 18 legs, exquisite every one of them, with remote-controlled toilets featuring water that changes color daily, delicately attended by the national hygiene service, with televisions in every room showing, for example, grand tropical landscapes for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, views of igloos for the people of Havana, subtle compensations that will shape every rebellion,
          etcetera.
    Which is to say, a satisfying world for reasonable people.
  And will there still remain someone, anyone, who is unreasonable?
  In some remote corner, a vestige of the lost Kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the Kingdom. In someone’s laugh, someone’s tear, the survival of the Kingdom. Ultimately, it seems man will not be satisfied by killing his fellow man. He’s going to escape him, he’s going to grab the rudder of the electric machine, of his sidereal rocket, he’s going to toss him overboard and leave him to the greyhounds. Everything can be killed except the nostalgia for the Kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love, in everything that profoundly torments and tricks and undoes us. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is another possible definition of the featherless biped."
                    —Hopscotch Ch. 71, orig. trans.
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          Pretty prescient for a bitter rant buried in a meandering novel from 1963. In essence, I'm still trying to describe this "satisfying world" today.
          You Must Relax is a collection of 36 short stories. It exists entirely online because it is by and for a sensibility that is entirely online. It did not pass The Publisher; it did not collect $200—or whatever The Publisher pays authors these days—nor did it pass by any editors, agents, focus groups, or Twitter-obsessed censors.
         It’s best read on a computer, where the layout has space to unfold like a book. If you’re set on reading it on a phone, I can’t really stop you, but I can shirk any and all responsibility for a poor reading experience.
          If you dislike this book, and you’re on mobile, please do me the small kindness of blaming your phone—that almighty usurper of the 21st century intellect!—and not me. This is not a book about how our beloved and often excessively decorated pocket-robots are stealing that which is most precious to us, but it’s not not about that either, so try to read it on a bigger screen if possible. If you don’t have one, well, I mean, how far is the library really?
   But that’s enough about that. Without further hedging, here’s the book, released serially, one story every Sunday, for the next 36 weeks.                                                                              
                                             -HCG September 1, 2022


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