Nothing Looks Cooler Than Not Caring You’re Balding

Not to mention, there are more and more reliable ways than ever to be not-bald if that is your preference. There are pills and tinctures you can order online after visiting virtually with a doctor. But I’m not going there, for the same reason I ignore the gas station pills that vow to turn you into a sexual rhinoceros or whatever. I choose to accept my mammalian shortcomings without staging chemical intervention. Still, hair restoration surgery has improved by Jason-Momoa’s-follicle-length leaps over the past several years. When I was a kid, hair plugs had the pitiable density of a field of freshly planted grass. Now, for the price of a few thousand bucks (according to a search in an incognito tab) and a quick jaunt to Turkey, a self-conscious party can return home looking like Fabio or Dr. J in their respective primes.

We’ve long held a preference for eliminating the middle ground. Michael Jordan iconically embraced a full head of head from a young age. Frank Sinatra was a famous wearer of hairpieces. Our nation’s two foremost labor-crushing, space-tickling overlords take opposite approaches to this issue. Jeff Bezos chose to strip the bandaid off with a razor blade, going full scalp-to-sky. Elon Musk went in the other direction and built levies against his receding hairline. To his credit, those furry bulwarks have held up better than his rockets and self-driving cars. Much like the way the baseball analytics led hitters to three “true outcomes,” our culture has pushed us towards two ends of the hair-having spectrum: Fully bald or entirely fuzzy.

It’s easy to forget that these two antitheses are not our only choices. Baldness is a spectrum, not a binary. There is nuance to be found between the poles, and a valor to those willing to exist within that liminal space. “I am not yet bald, and I may always be balding,” is an acknowledgement that identity is not fixed, it’s ever-changing, and there’s no shame in embodying that truth. To do so is to reject both nostalgia and fatalism in favor of living in the present moment, whatever that looks like. Balding in real time rejects the rigidity of either/or as well as the gluttony of both/and. Living in neither one space nor another isn’t heroic, exactly, but it is honest, transparent, real. This is the promise of the horseshoe of truth. With that in mind, I’d like to salute a few of the men who proudly stake out the middle distance between hairless and hirsute, and the myriad ways they embody the boldness of balding.

Enrico Colantoni (Honarary mention:John Carroll Lynch)