“Raw beauty for me is the perfect aesthetic beauty, since it is real, evocative, unpolished, and spontaneously natural. It is the perfect aesthetic beauty with its skin off—messy, honest, and sometimes more powerful than the ideal.”
— Letter from George #9
“Z” was chosen because it follows Generations X and Y.
“Z,” though, implies the end of the alphabet—and I wonder what comes next.
Hopefully, a restart?
With Gen Z, identity becomes an interface, and smartphones become an extension of the eyes—a digital prism where reality struggles to survive.
In a world flooded with filters, edits, and algorithms, the concept of raw beauty seems almost nostalgic.
For Gen Z, raw beauty isn’t about the absence of editing. It’s about control over context.
Raw beauty isn’t the opposite of curation—it is curation.
They grew up decoding visual cues—tone, mood, filter, composition—often subconsciously.
In a sense, raw beauty hasn’t been lost; it’s just been absorbed into a new system of expression, shaped by algorithms on our screens.
They understand that beauty today isn’t about being seen unfiltered. It’s about being seen on your own terms—even if those terms are digital, stylized, or deliberately strange.
This is not raw.
This is not aesthetic.
This is something else entirely.
Some call it the “new aesthetic mode.”
Cute.
For me, it is raw chaos—a digital hole!
A place you fall into, where things disappear but also reappear—filtered, broken, glowing.
This digital hole is:
- Bottomless—there is no final image, no final self
- Shifting—it reshapes around you
- Emptying—you never quite get back what you put in
- Echoing—your voice returns, but warped
But the original raw comes from roots, and trees will always grow strong from the soil.
Social scientists are already shifting focus from Gen Z to Gen Alpha—Alpha, like a return to the roots.
Gen Alpha will shift back to the roots, because nature always prevails.
Why don’t we all turn our heads away from the digital hole, back to our roots, and reboot with re-rooting?
Pause. Touch. Be.—for Generations Z and Alpha.
Nature calls out for all of us.
-GF
