Shiny Happy People
EXISTENTIAL CRISES are not uncommon in the lives of men. Nor are they always limited to a single moment, instead unfurling silently over months or years. But what often follows is a transformation – one in which a man overcomes the petrifying anxieties that have been torturing him and sees his life replenished with new possibilities.
For many men, the crisis originates in the discovery of hairs on a pillow, the gradual recognition of a receding hairline, or wispiness on the crown of the head – all bringing intimations of mortality and decline. In other words, it’s the realisation that they’re going bald, just as their dad or uncle did.
But for just as many men, salvation arrives in the form of a set of clippers, a mirror and the will to walk the hot coals of change by shaving it all off. Some 2000-odd years after St Paul underwent the prototypical road-to-Damascus experience, Ben Bakht, a 26-year-old filmmaker, had his own moment, immediately after shaving his head.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” Bakht says today. “Subconsciously, it unlocked a lot of things.”
Since the age of 18, he explains, he’d been living with the anxiety of losing his hair. “I remember going to McDonald’s and a friend said, ‘Your hairline is receding a bit’. At university, it was a running joke – ‘Ben’s going bald’.”
Male-pattern baldness, or androgenic alopecia, will affect half of men by the age of 50, though many are forced to contend with it much earlier.
“I used to quiff my hair,” says Bakht.
