We’re Not Normal. Thank God.
Why being clothes free socially is the perfect antidote to a deeply broken culture.
It wasn’t a long, detailed critique of our writing, nor was it a multi-paragraph breakdown of their own philosophy. It was just a single sentence: “Thank you for making me feel normal.”
We were having our first coffee of the morning, looking out over the yard, and this comment left on our article just sort of hovered in the air between us. It was a kind comment, deeply genuine, and we appreciated it more than we probably let on in our quick reply. But the word itself… normal. We kept turning it over like a strange stone you find on a beach. It made us think about why finding body neutrality in the modern world feels so rare. So we did what any reasonable people do when they can’t let a thought go. We thought about it for way too long, argued about it a little bit, and decided to write it all down.
We’ve actually said before, more than once, that we think being clothes free socially makes us a little weird. We stand by that completely. We don’t mean weird in a dark way that requires government monitoring, just weird in the way that any highly specific subculture looks when you zoom out far enough and view it against the backdrop of modern life. You can read a bit about the first time we mentioned it here: “Naturists Are Weird!“
We made a very deliberate, countercultural choice about our relationship with our own skin that ninety percent of the population considers somewhere between a mild mental eccentricity and an incomprehensible life choice. If you look at it strictly by the numbers, standing around in a field with no pants on while talking about the price of lumber is a little weird. We are entirely fine with that label. We wear it comfortably.
When someone says thank you for making them feel normal, they are expressing a profound sense of relief. They are saying that they spent a long time feeling broken, or out of place, or fundamentally wrong, and they finally found a corner of the world where the baseline shifted. It made us look at the yardstick people are using to measure themselves. We’ve seen normal. We live in normal every single day when we drive to our regular day jobs, buy groceries, turn on our televisions, and scroll the internet. And with the greatest possible respect to the collective human race, modern normal is an absolute, unmitigated shitshow.
The Architecture of the Ordinary
Consider for a moment what our culture currently accepts without a single collective blink of an eye. We have constructed a reality where things that are fundamentally warped are treated as standard operating procedure, while things that are entirely basic to the human condition are treated as a crisis.
Normal is a fourteen-year-old finishing his math homework, then spending three hours in his bedroom playing a military simulation game where he executes increasingly creative tactical kills while a highly sophisticated matchmaking algorithm finds him fresh opponents across the globe. This is considered a mainstream hobby. There are professional leagues for this, corporate sponsorships, and parents who proudly cheer on their kids for their digital marksmanship.
Normal is that same kid, maybe two years later, having been served highly targeted algorithmic pornography on the very same device he uses for his high school history assignments. He develops his entire foundational understanding of intimacy, human connection, and physical bodies from content that was specifically engineered by data scientists to be as extreme and boundary-pushing as possible in order to hold his attention span for another ninety seconds so an ad can load. We don’t talk about this at Sunday dinner. It’s just the background radiation of growing up today. It’s normal.
Then you look at our entertainment. Normal is the absolute train wreck called The Real Housewives franchise, and here we should pause to mention that one of us (Corin) watches this with genuine, unironic enthusiasm and does not appreciate the implication that it is a symptom of societal decay. But if you look at it objectively, it has spent well over a decade normalizing ritualized psychological humiliation, weaponized friendship, and adults screaming at each other across table settings that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. It is considered prestige television. There are multi-part reunion specials where people analyze the screaming matches like they are historic peace treaties.
Meanwhile, the other one of us (Kevin) binge watches The Boys and considers it high-quality television. It features, among many other cheerful things, a superhero whose primary power involves ripping human beings apart, a corporate mascot who casually commits war crimes for branding purposes, and enough graphic, visceral content per episode to have gotten everyone involved arrested in a previous generation. I watched every single season. We are not writing this piece from a stone monastery on a hill, wrapped in hemp robes. We are deeply embedded in the culture, which is exactly why we can see how crazy it is.
Normal is watching a football game where the commercial breaks contain a very specific, unchanging sequence designed to trigger every primal instinct we have. First is a beer ad celebrating camaraderie, followed immediately by a gambling app ad encouraging you to bet your grocery money on the next play, followed by a pharmaceutical ad for erectile dysfunction, followed by a trailer for a horror film in which a teenager is kept in a dark box under a house. Then you get a car ad featuring a peaceful waterfall, and then we go right back to the football game. We don’t even process the whiplash anymore.
Look at what we do right before we close our eyes at night. Normal is doomscrolling. It is the routine practice of lying in the dark, the blue light of a smartphone illuminating our faces, while we read about geopolitical collapse, escalating war, natural disasters, and various forms of tragic human suffering as a specific wind-down routine before attempting to get eight hours of restful sleep. There are entire platforms optimized by billionaires to ensure you see the worst news possible right before you close your eyes. And we argue with people we have never met about these things. The apps are free because our peace of mind is the product.
Normal, as of this week, is a 600-ton steel structure nicknamed The Claw erected over the White House South Lawn so that mixed martial arts fighters can walk out of the Oval Office and into a cage and beat the shit out of each other while dirt bikes do backflips overhead and corporations pay a million dollars a seat to watch. This is how the United States is celebrating its 250th birthday. We are not making this up. It’s Mad Max Thunderdome meets the Roman Colosseum with better lighting.
Normal is a culture that has spent decades methodically sexualizing the human body and then turning around and selling you products to fix the anxiety that created. The body is simultaneously too sexual to be seen and not sexual enough to be desirable. It has to be hidden, but it also has to be perfect underneath. We have normalized a system where your skin is both a moral hazard and a marketing opportunity, sometimes in the same magazine. It can no longer tell the difference between a naked person and a sexual act. A breastfeeding mother is flagged. A cologne ad featuring a nearly nude model is fine. The distinction being made has nothing to do with decency and everything to do with whether someone is making money from the image.
And yet we naturists are the weird ones. Just because we prefer to not wear clothing?
The Weight of Inherited Shame
If you want to understand how we arrived at a place where a naked body is more terrifying than a digital explosion, you have to look at the massive, institutional structures that handed us our definitions of normal in the first place. Chief among them is the long, complicated shadow of religious tradition.
For centuries, a significant portion of the western world has operated under the working theory that the human body is essentially a moral emergency that requires constant management. We were born into this framework without being consulted about it, which feels like a bit of an oversight.
Consider the theological architecture here. Many people sincerely believe that the human body was designed by an omnipotent, perfect creator who presumably knew exactly what he was doing. That same body, in its natural state, is treated as so dangerous and destabilizing that catching a glimpse of it can apparently unravel the fabric of civil society. The creator’s masterwork requires a modesty panel.
By the time most of us reach adulthood, we have absorbed years of quiet, inherited instruction that our bodies are fundamentally suspect. We stand in front of mirrors with a mental checklist of corrections rather than any particular gratitude for the thing keeping us alive. We have normalized the idea that your body is a lifelong renovation project that you are currently behind schedule on.
Nobody handed us a pamphlet explaining any of this. It just arrived, like furniture.
The Noise of the Modern Arena
Normal, by current standards, also includes the political landscape, which has become its own particularly committed form of performance art.
We have built a 24-hour outrage infrastructure so sophisticated that it practically runs itself. The algorithm knows, with eerie precision, exactly which headline will make your jaw tighten at 11pm, and it will find you wherever you are. You don’t have to go looking for things to be angry about anymore. They are delivered, pre-sorted by intensity, directly to your pocket.
And if the organic anger isn’t quite enough, there is an entire overseas industry of paid strangers whose full-time job is to impersonate your neighbors, manufacture outrage about your community, and collect a check from the platform while you fall for it. People are being paid to make you furious at people you’ve never met, about problems that are being deliberately exaggerated, by someone who couldn’t find your country on a map. This is the system working as intended.
In this environment, human bodies have become legislative talking points, argued over by people who will never meet you, in rooms you will never enter, by individuals with apparently strong opinions about your physical existence and approximately zero personal stake in it. This is considered civic engagement.
The expectation is that you will pick a side, maintain the appropriate level of fury, and view the people across the street not as neighbors who also can’t find a decent plumber, but as an existential threat to everything you hold dear. You are always representing something. You are always defending something. You are never, under any circumstances, just sitting quietly in the sun minding your own business.
Unless, of course, you are naked in nature. In which case that is literally all you are doing, and somehow that’s the controversial part.
The Reality of the “Weird” Alternative
So let’s contrast all of that ordinary, everyday chaos with what actually happens when you step inside a clothes free social environment. Let’s look at the terrifying, scandalous reality of what we “weirdos” are doing on a typical weekend afternoon.
If someone were to look through the forest of our local naturist park, they wouldn’t see a radical, revolutionary political movement. They wouldn’t see a hyper-sexualized playground or a den of countercultural rebels plotting the downfall of western civilization.
They would see a middle-aged guy with a slight beer gut struggling intensely to set up a temperamental folding lawn chair. They would see an incredibly average-looking woman reading a paperback thriller while trying to ensure she doesn’t get sunburned on her knees. They would hear a mind-numbing, beautifully boring conversation between two retired people about the absolute best way to grill a flank steak or whether it’s going to rain on Tuesday. They would smell a mixture of coconut sunscreen, damp grass, and woodsmoke from a nearby barbecue.
If you looked closely at Kevin during one of these afternoons, you’d see a guy trying to apply sunscreen to his own upper back, looking exactly like a grizzly bear trying to scratch an itch against a pine tree. There is zero dignity in it. There is absolutely no grandeur. It is completely, wonderfully mundane.
But here is the magic that happens in that boring little space: the badges of the outside world slowly disappear. When you strip away the clothes, you also strip away the armor. When you are sitting on a towel talking to someone, you have no idea what their bank account looks like. You don’t know if they are a corporate executive or a retired plumber unless you ask. You don’t know who they voted for in the last election, what their religious background is, or where they stand on the geopolitical crisis of the week.
All of the social markers that we use to categorize, judge, and separate ourselves in the “normal” world are left in a pile inside a car. You are forced to look at people exactly as they are, meaning imperfect, aging, diverse, and entirely human. You realize very quickly that everyone is carrying the exact same physical vulnerabilities. We all have scars, we all have stretch marks, we all have parts of ourselves that don’t look like the people on television. And the moment everyone is naked, the gap between how you actually look and how you are “supposed” to look simply evaporates. It stops mattering. The pressure cooker turns off.
Better Than Normal
Which brings us right back to that reader comment. Thank you for making me feel normal.
We’ve thought about it from every angle, and we don’t think we actually made that person feel normal at all. Normal, if you really look at the current cultural landscape, is a deeply hostile, toxic environment for anyone who has complicated feelings about their physical self, which, if we are being completely honest, is just about everyone. The entire machinery of modern society is specifically engineered to generate those insecurities, amplify them through a screen, and then immediately sell you a temporary cosmetic or material fix for the problem they just created. And then make you angry that they lied to you so you engage.
What being clothes free socially does on a good day, when the weather cooperates and the community is clicking, is offer something infinitely rarer and more valuable than normal. It provides a sanctuary from the noise. It gives you a few brief hours where your body is not a problem that requires fixing, a product that needs to be marketed, or a liability that has to be carefully managed.
It lets you step out of the arena. It allows you to realize that the voice in your head telling you that you aren’t enough is actually just the echo of a deeply confused culture that has its priorities entirely backward. And I am going to use the words again we have reflected on recently… “the forgetting.”
Stepping into this lifestyle takes a bit of bravery initially. We both remember that distinct, hesitant moment before our first clothes-free experience. The internal voices carried all that heavy baggage of shame, media standards, and social conditioning, screaming at us that we were doing something forbidden. But then your feet hit the sand or grass, the fresh air and sun hits your skin, and those voices finally shut up because reality takes over. You realize the sky hasn’t fallen. The world didn’t end. People are just having a swim and reading a book.
We have been asked more times than we can count to explain ourselves to the outside world. We have had to justify our choice to friends, family, and strangers, patiently reassuring them that nothing strange or unseemly is happening behind the gates. We do it with a smile, because we understand that we live at the margins of what’s considered acceptable, and we know people are genuinely curious.
But let’s be entirely clear about the ledger here: we are not the ones who normalized the chaos, the violence, the digital and religious shame, or the relentless political rage that defines modern life. We didn’t create a world where people lock themselves in their rooms to stare at terrifying headlines before they go to sleep. We just took our clothes off and sat in the sunshine.
So no, we are not normal. And honestly, thank God for that. Normal is doing a massive amount of damage to people’s spirits out there.
We don’t want any part of it. What we are chasing out here in the quiet spaces is something much better, much older, and far more durable than normal.
We’re just trying to be human.
Kevin and Corin
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