What Is Wrong With Gen Z?
Maybe they are actually getting clothes free living right!
For the better part of two decades, the prevailing anxiety around resort campfires and committee tables has been that clothes-free living is a dying art. It’s treated like a generational relic bound to fade away into the sunset with the Baby Boomers, and if you look at the empty membership rolls or the distinctly graying rosters at the front desk, it’s an easy conclusion to jump to. We’ve sat at those resort pools, enjoyed the conversations, and deeply appreciated the absolute peace of mind that comes with a secure, managed space where you can just kick back without a care in the world.
But that fear of a dying lifestyle is looking in completely the wrong place. When you sit down and talk to some people from Gen Z, you get a very different feel on the direction of a clothes free life.
The most comprehensive data we actually have comes from a 2022 Ipsos poll commissioned by British Naturism, and the numbers are enough to make you spit out your coffee. Fifty-five percent of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK had participated in clothes-free activities like skinny dipping, nude sunbathing, or visiting a naturist beach. Nearly half of them had been naked in the company of others in the past year alone, completely outside of partners, family, or doctor visits. Even wilder, twenty-three percent openly described themselves as naturists or nudists. Compare that to just four percent of the 45 to 75 age bracket who said the same. This isn’t a generation abandoning clothes-free living. It’s a generation leading it by a margin that should honestly embarrass every single hand-wringer at the traditional committee tables.
So, do those numbers translate over here to North America. Europe has always carried a much more relaxed, common-sense relationship with the human body than we do. Here’s the real problem with looking for equivalent data on our side of the pond… it largely doesn’t exist that we could find. The only institutions doing any counting are the ones measuring club memberships and resort attendance, and those numbers keep telling a story of decline because they are counting the wrong thing entirely.
Nobody is tracking the Gen Z hiker who sheds their clothes at a quiet alpine lake, the group of friends skinny dipping in a river at midnight, or the young woman finding a hidden cove to spend an afternoon naked in the sun without ever once considering whether she qualifies for a membership card. The absence of North American data isn’t evidence that nothing is happening. It’s just proof that what’s happening doesn’t fit inside the rigid little boxes the movement built for itself. Gen Z is participating in droves… they’re just not doing it where the old guard is looking.
Now, we are fully aware that as a Gen X middle-aged couple, we are a hell of a lot closer to the Boomer demographic than we are to a twenty-year-old. But anyone who has read our previous stories or viewed our photography knows that our true happy place has always been in the rawest, wildest parts of nature. We spend far more time hiking and scouting out hidden spots in the bush to be nude than we do behind manicured resort fences. We deeply relate to that youthful instinct to just shed the heavy armor of clothing and connect directly with the earth without a rulebook. And the more time we spend watching this younger generation quietly rewrite the rules, the more we think they are getting something right that the rest of us need to sit down and really think about.
Body Neutrality and the Platonic Vibe
Whenever we talk to people who have never stepped foot in a clothes-free space, the very first question is almost always driven by the exact same underlying anxiety: “But isn’t it sexual?” For decades, traditional naturist clubs felt they had to answer that question with a resounding, almost hyper-vigilant no. The old guard fought so hard against outside judgment that the culture within gated resorts sometimes became rigidly sterilized. You had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nudity had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality, occasionally resulting in an environment where people felt policed just for being human.
There is also a bit of an elephant in the room that the traditional naturist community hasn’t quite figured out how to talk about openly. For years, clothes-free spaces have faced persistent, bad-faith pressure from a fringe element hiding behind the trendy language of “sex positivity,” which often means people attempting to normalize creepy, boundary-crossing behavior in public spaces that would be flat-out illegal anywhere else. That threat is real, it isn’t hypothetical, and the traditional community’s response of higher walls, stricter rules, and heightened vigilance has been entirely justified to protect women, families, and newcomers.
But blunt instruments end up catching the wrong people, too. When a younger generation arrives at the resort door already fluent in sex positivity as casual, everyday cultural vocabulary, not as a proposition or a pickup line, but simply as the healthy, shame-free water they grew up swimming in, they run directly into defensive walls that weren’t built for them. They get treated with the exact same suspicion as the bad actors causing the actual problems. The result is a massive generational misread that is costing naturism exactly the audience it needs most.
That is where a concept called “body neutrality” comes in, and it turns out to be the exact philosophical framework that resolves the whole tension. It doesn’t tear the defensive walls down, but it gives everyone a much clearer way to identify who actually belongs inside them. Where traditional body positivity tells you to look in the mirror and force yourself to love every single flaw, which is exhausting and frankly unrealistic most days, body neutrality lowers the temperature entirely. We wrote about the “All bodies are beautiful” slogan and why it needs to change. Body Neutrality shifts the focus from how a body looks to what a body does. It’s the liberating realization that your skin is just biology, not a billboard, an invitation, or a performance.
Gen Z isn’t just testing the waters of non-sexual social nudity. They are simply living it in the backcountry with a naturalness and consistency that the movement spent an entire century writing mission statements trying to achieve. The philosophy that fills our pamphlets and our bylaws is just their default setting. A group of twenty-somethings skinny dipping in a mountain lake aren’t policing each other’s behavior or consulting a printed code of conduct. They just aren’t bringing sexuality into the water because it doesn’t even occur to them to do so. The body is present, and it isn’t an event. They skipped the sermon and went straight to the river.
Because they grew up without that heavy, old-school societal shame surrounding human sexuality, they don’t feel the defensive need to over-correct by pretending attraction doesn’t exist. They can skinny-dip in a mixed group of friends, acknowledge that human bodies are naturally complex, and still keep the entire experience completely platonic and respectful. And it’s not because someone put up a warning sign. That’s just how it is when you’re there for the right reasons.
For young women in particular, this matters in a way that goes far beyond abstract philosophy. Corin lives this every time we step onto a trail. In a digital world where women’s bodies are constantly commodified, filtered, tracked, and evaluated by forces entirely outside their control, stepping out of your clothes in a secluded canyon or a hidden swimming hole is an act of deliberate, fierce reclamation. It’s a way of completely delinking nudity from sexual availability on your own terms, in a space where the people around you have agreed, without ever saying a single word aloud, that your body is not an invitation. The peer group enforces that code naturally through a shared, quiet understanding of exactly why everyone is there.
They are proving that you don’t need a formal institution to maintain a safe, platonic environment. You just need a community that has already decided what the space is actually for.
Digital Armor and the Locker Room Rebellion
There is a bizarre contradiction here that will trip you up until you really sit back and look at the digital world these kids actually grew up in. If you talk to high school gym teachers or look at recent youth studies, they will tell you the exact same thing: younger people are deeply uncomfortable in what used to be common clothes-free spaces like public locker rooms or communal school showers. They will change under towels, or they will skip the shower entirely to avoid catching a glimpse of someone else or being seen themselves. To the old guard, this looks like a massive step backward into Victorian prudishness. But you have to look at the cultural landscape they inherited, and honestly, how each generation before them handed it down.
If we looked at the timeline over a drink, the handoff is pretty clear. Our generation built the actual infrastructure of the digital world; we laid the wires, coded the early platforms, and created the tools. Then the Millennials came along and used that playground to invent modern influencer culture. They turned social media into a highly curated lifestyle grid on places like Instagram, establishing the blueprint for the “accessible celebrity” where regular life became a personal brand.
But Gen Z found themselves right at the ground zero of a fast-moving, 24/7 algorithmic performance culture. They didn’t ask to have their youth gamified, but they were digital natives dropped straight into a world dominated by high-velocity platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Before they were even old enough to fully understand what it was costing their peace of mind, daily life, from simple “get ready with me” routines to deep personal struggles, was being channeled into consumable content for an insatiable online audience. They didn’t build that performative trap, but they became the ones forced to live inside it. And for many, their own parents used them as marketing tools.
And because they’ve been on the front lines of that digital landscape, they are the ones who hit the wall of algorithmic burnout first. They are dealing with a massive wave of what kids are calling “authenticity fatigue,” growing up in an online world crowded with face filters, heavily edited scripts, and AI personas. The skepticism runs deep enough that nearly nine in ten Gen Z social media users now describe themselves as “deinfluenced,” actively warning each other away from products and lifestyles that influencers are paid to push. Industry research consistently shows Gen Z trusting customer reviews and independent sources well above paid influencer content, a complete reversal of the relationship marketers spent the last decade building. They are simply exhausted by the constant pressure to live life behind a digital billboard.
But the researchers found the kids absolutely reject them because they are emotionally vacant and have zero lived experience. The study noted that they deliver polish, not presence; style, not soul. Marketers are losing their minds trying to figure out how to fake a human heartbeat to sell products, while a consumer study shows that only 55% of Gen Z even trust influencer content anymore. They are just exhausted by the constant pressure to live life behind a digital billboard.
That is why their quiet digital rebellion is so impressive. They are leading a massive cultural pivot toward trends like “Posting Zero,” where they keep their social profiles active but rarely post any permanent content because privacy has become the ultimate luxury. They are actively trying to “Touch Grass” by swapping screen time for brick phones, analog hobbies, and real-world communities that can’t be monetized, tracked, or broadcasted.
The public locker room terrifies them because it’s sterile, full of mirrors, and completely unsecured; any idiot with a smartphone can turn a private, vulnerable moment into an unconsented viral meme by lunchtime. In that environment, clothes are a necessary layer of digital armor.
But a wild, clothes-free space in the backcountry liberates them for the exact same reason it liberates us… because out there, nobody is watching, and nobody is keeping score. When they hike into a remote canyon or find a hidden river bend, shedding their clothes isn’t an exhibitionist performance; it is the ultimate expression of “Posting Zero.” It is a deliberate, radical detox from a hyper-curated world.
We know that exact feeling of relief firsthand. When we are miles from the nearest road, surrounded by nothing but trees and moving water, taking off your clothes stops being a logical decision and just becomes a massive relief. You are stepping out of the matrix entirely. No background hum, no scrolling, no metrics. Just skin, elements, and actual, unrecorded quiet.
They’re Building Something Very Familiar That Matters To Them
If you watch a group of young people in a clothes-free space long enough, a beautiful pattern emerges that is worth looking at closely. What they are constructing in the wild, both deliberately and instinctively, isn’t just a random weekend party. They are creating a sanctuary from the transactional, hyper-produced world they deal with from the second they wake up.
First off, there is absolutely no performance requirement. You arrive exactly as you are, literally, and the social hierarchy that normally operates through expensive clothing, fashion brands, and curated appearances simply evaporates into thin air. Nobody is signaling how much money they have through what they’re wearing because nobody is wearing anything. The beautiful leveling effect that naturists have talked about for a whole century lands a lot differently when you’ve spent your entire youth in a world where every single social environment has a hyper-specific, unwritten dress code.
There is also no networking out there. Nobody is trying to pitch a business or build a personal brand at a backcountry hot spring. In a generation that has watched every single authentic corner of their lives get bought up, sponsored, and monetized by influencer culture, a space that stubbornly resists that noise feels almost radical. It’s just real bodies in a real place, together, without a screen sitting between their eyes and the world.
Consent isn’t a rule on a sign out here either; it’s the firm foundation. Gen Z arrives in these spaces with a much more internalized, sophisticated understanding of boundaries than any previous generation. The unspoken code that governs their clothes-free spaces runs on exactly that foundation; everyone present has implicitly agreed to the clean nature of the space and what it is for. And that leads to the thing that might matter most of all to us: a space that exists entirely outside of documentation.
For a generation that has never known a social experience that wasn’t a photo or a story or a post planned out in advance, an afternoon that is completely unrecorded isn’t a small thing. It’s everything. It’s the rarest, most sacred experience available to them in the modern world. All of this maps directly onto traditional naturist philosophy, even if nobody in that mountain lake has ever heard the word or wants to be defined by the label.
There are other reasons this physical connection matters so deeply to them, too. Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with climate anxiety not as a political position to debate online, but as a heavy weight they carry every day. The natural world isn’t an abstract concept to them; it’s something they were handed with a massive warning label attached. Corin and I have talked about this while sitting by the water. When they strip off their clothes and wade into a freezing cold river or stretch out on a sun-warmed rock, they are closing the last remaining distance between themselves and a planet they are genuinely afraid of losing. The skin-to-earth contact isn’t incidental to the afternoon; it’s the entire point of being there. Naturism has always understood that visceral connection intuitively. Gen Z is arriving at it through a mixture of grief and joy, which makes it land even deeper in their bones.
Underneath all of it runs a truth that doesn’t gets hidden about this generation as well: Gen Z is the loneliest generation in recorded history. It’s not for a lack of contact; they are constantly, exhaustingly connected to a digital grid. But genuine, low-stakes, real-world physical community is something they are actively starving for and increasingly hard-pressed to find. Most social environments available to them require a performance, a specific look, or a personal brand maintained at all times. The clothes-free spaces they are building in the wild strip all of that heavy baggage away by design. You cannot perform very much when you are standing in a river with nothing on.
What remains is just people, present, together, without an agenda. They arrived at the doctrine without ever stepping inside the church. They are living the answer without ever knowing anyone wrote the question down.
Two Roads to the Same Place
Because clothes-free living was once viewed by the mainstream as a massive taboo, previous generations had to become builders. They had to organize. To survive in a judgmental world, the pioneers of the movement built literal fortresses: gated resorts, non-profit clubs, strict bylaws, and physical committees to protect their right to exist. It was a defensive posture born out of absolute necessity. But to a young person today, checking in at a front desk, buying a printed membership placard for their dashboard, and reading through a tri-folded pamphlet of club rules feels a bit like entering a historical time capsule from 1984.
Gen Z doesn’t want the bureaucracy, and we can’t say we blame them. They don’t view clothes-free living as a formal club identity that requires a lanyard or a card to prove. They see it as a fluid, natural extension of things they are already doing out in the world, like wild swimming, backcountry hiking, wellness, and environmentalism. They don’t need a metal sign to give them permission.
Of course, we say all this while sitting here as card-carrying, dues-paying members of the Federation of Canadian Naturists, the AANR, and our own local naturist park. My wallet looks less like a rugged backcountry explorer’s and more like an executive rolodex of institutional nudity. Which is hilarious when most times I have nowhere to carry the damn thing. We are fully invested in the very system the younger crowd is bypassing, which makes for a pretty funny view from where we sit. But you don’t have to tear down the old guard to appreciate the new.
Here’s what’s truly fascinating to watch: Gen Z figured out how to build that exact same safe environment without needing the physical walls. Their version runs on community trust rather than membership fees, leading to a shared, unspoken code enforced gently by the group rather than a gatekeeper. It’s a completely different mechanism, but it leads to the exact same destination, and it provides that exact same beautiful feeling of the mental radar finally going quiet.
It’s simply two different roads to the exact same place. In our own lives, we’ve taken both, and we will absolutely keep taking both. Our own history shows that we gravitate heavily toward that wild freedom; we spend far more of our time mapping out remote trails and finding untouched spaces in the bush to be nude than we do sitting inside resort borders. There is an unmatched magic to discovering a hidden slice of the world where you can just exist with the elements on your own terms.
But our travels have also taught us that these two worlds don’t have to be at war. As much as we chase the raw freedom of the backcountry, we also deeply appreciate the distinct, worry-free comfort of a managed resort. Let’s be honest: being clothes-free in the wild requires a certain amount of background bandwidth. You are always playing a bit of a logistical chess match, keeping one ear open for the sound of approaching hiking boots, scanning the treeline, and wondering if a family is about to picnic around the next bend. You are never entirely off guard. When you pull through the gates of a well-run resort, you are paying for the luxury of completely shutting down that defensive radar. You can set down your towel, wade into the pool or lake, grab a drink, and kick back in an environment where your privacy and peace of mind are fiercely protected by design.
It is easy to look at a changing world and worry that something you love is slipping through your fingers. For years, conversations around resort campfires have carried that anxious undercurrent about the future of naturism. But spending time out on the trails, watching the next generation quietly rewrite the rules, gives us something we didn’t entirely expect: genuine, unshakeable optimism.
The lifestyle isn’t dying at all. It’s just evolving past the gates. What Gen Z is getting right is something we’ve always felt in our own bones throughout our entire journey, because clothes-free living doesn’t need an official stamp of approval or a committee vote to be valid. By stripping away the old-school bureaucracy and stepping directly onto the dirt, they are returning the movement to its absolute purest roots. They are reminding all of us that the human body doesn’t need to be polished, branded, or apologized for.
It is simply biology, a vessel designed to feel the rush of a cold river, the heat of the afternoon sun, and the brush of the wind through the trees. The kids aren’t ruining naturism. In many ways, they are finally setting it free. They are stepping into the woods, leaving the digital armor behind, and finding their way back to something that was never really lost in the first place.
Just forgotten, briefly, behind a gate.
Kevin & Corin
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