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Shakespeare had it wrong: uneasy is the head that wears no crown. Because from Samson onwards, men have feared losing their hair. It’s something to do with ageing perhaps, a sense of retreat or fading virility — though for decades a comforting myth persisted that bald men actually had an excess of testosterone. But there’s no way of spinning it: the condition still inspires a visceral reaction. Just compare thumb-headed Prince William with golden, wavy Prince Wills.
Lifelong sufferers report dysphoric levels of internal torment. Christopher, now 62, started shedding when he was 28. “I was so proud of my thick hair, but it just got thinner and thinner,” he says. “It changes your image of yourself fundamentally, at least it did for me. Because my hair was so thick I never thought it would, and then I just thought, ‘Oh fucking hell. I’m going to be one of those bald guys.’ I’m not exaggerating — it robbed life of any pleasure. Just looking in the mirror became a torture. And I already drank a lot, and I started drinking really heavily after that. My drinking took on a really dark turn after the hair loss — it just poisoned everything.”
Christopher had five hair transplants over a couple of decades, and the final one “took” completely, leaving him with a full head of hair. But he tells me about a friend who started losing his as a teenager. “I know that it destroyed his self-confidence,” Christopher says. The friend, now 70, neither treated nor shaved it, persisting with “combovers and things like that”. “He would say, ‘Once you go bald, your looks are gone and you’re always going to have to accept second-best in terms of a wife’… I know it ruined his life.”
In an age of technologically compelled self-obsession, a version of this fear is already filtering down to my own age group. Having barely achieved the quarter-century, friends are inspecting their family trees for evolutionary disadvantage, peeling back fringes to reveal widow’s peaks and Eiger foreheads. It is now more than common for my social reunions to begin with an update on the loosened thatch — stories of smoothing back your rug only to find yourself with furry fingers, and of showers that seem uncomfortably akin to shaves. These anecdotes find plenty of statistical company. A quarter of men who develop hereditary male baldness (“androgenic alopecia”) see symptoms before the age of 21; by 35, two-thirds of men have lost at least some of their hair.
Such is the potency of this fear that young men try to palliatively anticipate what’s to come. Ben is 29, and has been using medicinal treatments for hair loss for two years. “It was like a preventative thing,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as someone who is vain. But I don’t really exercise, and if I were to lose my hair, I’d basically just become my dad… It’s almost like a psychological thing where, if I take this pill, I’ll keep my hair. It’s like an anxiety deferred.” But he’s sure this is more prevalent among young men than it used to be. “If I was a 30-year-old man in the Seventies, and I was going bald, no one would care. Something has happened in the last 40 years.” And he’s right. For most of human history, however miserable it made them, men could do nothing about their condition. But now an entire male baldness industry has arisen to simultaneously nurture and service their fears.
The gold standard is, of course, the transplant, a treatment which sprouted onto the British male psyche in 2011 when Wayne Rooney explained: “I was going bald at 25 — why not?” In response, millions of men must have thought: if a guy who’s been turned into a Shrek doll by his own fans can have a decent head of hair, why not me? Other celebrities followed suit (“Rio Ferdinand shows off his new hair and beard transplant,” as the sidebar of shame had it last month) and now a £1.5 billion transplant economy has now opened up, headquartered in Istanbul. Nor is the trip necessarily a fool’s errand. For the scale of change possible, observe the stunning transformation of Arsenal defender Rob Holding from tonsured no-hoper to barbershop pin-up.
Though increasingly popular, this is still the expensive option, costing thousands in Turkey, and tens thereof in England. For those of leaner means, or whose condition is not yet so severe, there are alternatives. An entire fleet of companies has surfaced: Keeps, Rogaine, Happy Head, Scandinavian Biolabs, Sons UK, Numan, Unthin, Manual and Hims. If you haven’t heard of them, check the social media feed of any man you know. You’ll find their before-and-after adverts squatting there, admonishing and inviting.
For around £20 a month, you’ll receive a mixture of topical and oral treatments (pills, shampoos, serums and sprays) which make use of two main chemicals, minoxidil and finasteride. The first came about by happy accident. Minoxidil is a vasodilator (a drug used to treat high blood pressure) originally developed in the Seventies. But when it was tested, doctors noticed that it also stimulated hair growth (exactly why is still somewhat unclear) and it was directed towards hair-loss treatment in 1986. Finasteride, meanwhile, is a “preventer”. The drug stops testosterone from turning into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a male development hormone, and was first developed to treat enlarged prostates in 1992. But, since DHT also stops hair growing, reducing its presence in the body can slow hair loss, including after it has already begun. The product joined minoxidil in a different section of the pharmacy in 1997. As cosmetic treatments, neither is available on the NHS for hair loss, though they have been available from private pharmacies for years.
In this way, these companies are effectively pulling off a marketing trick more than a medical miracle: they offer the slickness of a “telehealth” service, employing online physicians to validate prescription-subscriptions which are then sent out in the mail. And in this digital setting, a distinctive, millennial tech start-up aesthetic emerges: gorgeous websites, pastel colours, and stylish, sans-serif fonts. Hims is most typical, and like any modern company worth its screentime, offers a philosophy as well as a product. “Hims is about personal wellness,” its website boasts. “You should look and feel your best all the time. Our job is to make that easy and affordable… We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted. Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves [we’re too often told]. What a load of bollocks.”
This is the language of wellness, of looksmaxxing and personal optimisation, turned into breathy corporate advertising copy. The packaging of Hims’s bottles and pouches is of a piece — beige, clean and minimalist. Manual, which Ben uses, does the same: “You get a little box, and it’s very cute, and it’s like you’re opening a present… It’s almost like they’ve managed to remove all stigma around what is essentially a pharmaceutical product, and it just becomes another thing that you take alongside your vitamin D and vitamin C tablets.” Much like the supplement industry, they are marketing hair regrowth as a route to the giddy state of “self-care”. And not just hair regrowth — several (but not all) of these companies offer other optimising pathways to spot-free skin and top-notch sexual performance. In this context, hair regrowth becomes just one waypoint of many along the road to total masculine performance.
But obviously there is a catch. For a start, none of these treatments is guaranteed to work — and certainly not to levels of reforestation depicted in the adverts — while the hair that grows can be thin, and disappointingly downy (“peach fuzz”, Christopher calls it). The drugs can also take months to have any effect, which, for all the many happy customers, will see many men paying for weeks’ worth of ultimately useless brew, while (unlike transplants) any improvements will disappear the moment you stop taking them. And, frequently noted in manosphere-adjacent corners of the internet, finasteride especially can have some worrisome side-effects: depression, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. Which makes you wonder if Hims were onto something with the specific combination of treatments they offer.
Nevertheless, men are flocking to these companies. While there’s little evidence that hair loss is statistically more prevalent today, the psychologists’ verdict is that social media has made millennials and Gen Z more “hair aware”. Popular Reddit threads such as r/tressless and r/HaircareScience provide a platform for tens of thousands of young men to trade tips on courses of “min” and “fin”, and share their own progress, uploading dozens images of their gradually thickening scalps. Even those who suffer the side-effects shrug them off: “Had a couple of days of ball ache and I don’t get morning wood anymore,” one user told me. “But fine. Satisfied with the results.”
Another man in his 40s making use of finasteride explained it “has had some psychological effects such as moderate depression that I have recently mitigated via antidepressants”. But, not to be deterred, he’s just starting using minoxidil too. Ben, meanwhile, used finasteride before minoxidil, and reported a plunging period of depression. “I was taking actually a very small dose, like half the dose I was recommended, and I just felt dead inside… It’s actually really disturbing that you can send off for something on the internet which can put you in such a dark place.” (Manual lists “low mood, depression or thoughts of self-harm” as very rare side-effects on its website.)
This is not exactly the relationship one might expect between a health supplement and its consumer, and it’s quite self-evident what all this really adds up to. In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to clarify the phase of late capitalism that had established itself in the post-war United States, based around the marketing of luxury and consumer goods. Many had been retailed through what he called “the dependence effect”, by which consumers’ “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”. Frequently, producers may go as far as to “actively create wants through advertising and salesmanship”. In the Fifties, this meant white goods and General Motors. But now individual happiness is found in the mirror, much as it was once found in things.
Since then, with nowhere else left to colonise, capitalism has begun to cultivate the interior self, as it once did the fields and forests. And, it should be noted, this follows a strategy that has already been tried and tested to tremendous effect on at least 50% of the population. Women, for whom the scale of personal refurbishment demanded by society was always greater, have long been sold the language of optimisation and tweakments. It is part-and-parcel of existence as a female citizen-consumer, but also of a feminist discourse that has been critiquing the relationship of the cosmetic to the political for decades.
The old stereotype of male insouciance when it comes to appearance is equally now long dead. A brave new world has crept up to replace it: of hair regrowth, breaking your femurs to gain a few inches in height, chin implants to achieve a squarer bone structure, and penis-enlargement surgery. But this is all about as liberating as the first appearance of Botox, another very 21st-century promise of cash-for-youth, cash-for-looks. It is another patch of the private realm swept into the orbit of commerce and checkout, a demand that may be exploited, but is ultimately unsatisfied.
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SubscribeThe rise of spirituality is both a response to the same questions that humans have personally had for thousands of years, as well as the human corruption too often present in organized religion. We want a spiritual dimension to our existence, but we do not want the packaging of what is on offer.
The Big Bang is very clearly not an answer to “why is there anything at all?” It assumes a super hot, super dense ball of mass-energy that then explodes. So where did that super hot super dense ball come from? Apparently that is not worth discussing because very simply, it is a question that science cannot answer.
There are many in the West these days that are “remembering” that there are many questions that are not suited for scientific inquiry, that science cannot answer.
Yet it is somehow embedded in us to seek for those answers regardless.
Heaven forbid.
As long as Gens Z and Alpha remain atheists or agnostics they will never consider converting to Islam or becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Rather than putting moribund religions on life-support, how about trying something more akin to ancestor worship to fill the spiritual void? At the moment I’m reading ‘In Memory of Memory’ by Maria Stepanova and the author describes days when she was off school and her mum would retrieve the old family photo albums from a cupboard, along with various random trinkets from great-grandparents strewn across time and the Russian empire. After looking at these bearded old men and young schoolgirls in salior suits who later became grannies, a sense of the enormity of it all would overcome her. Surely this is the feeling people are after: a feeling of enormity and depth. And the bonus is that you don’t need to pretend to yourself that you believe something totally incredible.
Another book I read recently was ‘Black Robe’ by Brian Moore about French Catholic missionaries trying to convert the Native American Indians of Canada. The Indians, who already had their ancestor worship, couldn’t grasp what the missionaries were trying to convert them to, and seen from the Indians’ point of view, you could see why. Even the missionaries themselves couldn’t quite believe what they were teaching. You finish the novel feeling that the Indians’ belief that the ghosts of their ancestors constantly guide and interact with them is not nearly so strange as the one peddled by the priests.
After Gen Z, what of Gen Alpha, the ‘New Ones’?
Like Tom Holland has observed, all the young people I know have no knowledge whatsoever of the stories of either Testament. Mention the widow’s mite or the Good Samaritan and they will look blank. Some aren’t even sure where Sweden is.
The phrases from scripture that had passed into common usage by the 19th century, such as ‘the land of Nod’ or ‘Jesus called a little child’, are now never used by Gen Z or Alpha as they would have been by their grandparents.
In an earlier age there was a grander faith. That faith described by John of Revelation is difficult to find even among Christians.
“Some aren’t even sure where Sweden is“. I was unaware that Sweden even featured in the Bible.
I think that’s where Woden lives.
“And now it has been reported that British members of Generation Z — people now in their teens and twenties — are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”“. There is a world of difference between “indentifying as ‘spiritual'”, and being “Christian” (or indeed embracing any “old” religion). Identifying as spiritual is far more likely to come as a result of a psychedelic drug experience as from visiting a traditional “place of worship”.
Why do I get the impression you’re fervently hoping for your explanation to be true.
I can assure you that I have had plenty of experiences with psychedelics.
Is it religion or it it boundaries and parameters we are talking of here? Most of society prefers order to chaos. Increasingly we are leaning toward the latter. No surprise then that tenet based philosophies are becoming more popular amongst those more exposed and susceptible to the negative and isolating effects of social media et al. That is, the Gen Z of this article.
There’s a god-shaped itch in our society. The young feel this more acutely than older generations and are looking to belief systems for the scratch.
Yes, but the belief systems are not those of their grandparents.
Maybe they are but thankfully it does not seem to take the form of the moralising hypocritical Christianity of yesteryear and parts of the US. If anything it resembles the spiritual seeking of the yogic and Buddhist traditions where mastery of the breath is the prelude to mastery of the mind, the emotions and all desire of which the dopamine hellscape of smartphone addiction is emblematic.
Exactly!
They’ll still feel empty and lost then.
As a British Muslim, I would love it if Christianity is indeed growing amongst young Brits.
A society will eventually decline if it loses its faith. Sooner or later.
Yes, but do you also support the growth of Judaism?
Direct hit!
I support the growth of all religions. But the bloodthirsty sadists of the Likud party do not represent Judaism. Zionism is not Judaism.
Gen Z is turning back to fundamentals across many dimensions. They favour in person connections, they are developing strategies to avoid the dopamine scrolling hellscape of the smartphone, they are more curious than curated by the zeitgeist, and more confident to stand apart. Dogmatism is giving way to pragmatism, and they are more likely to respond than react. And yes, for some, spiritual enquiry is part of the journey. I would say their interest is more in faith than religion, where faith can take many forms.
I have been teaching 350 of them every year since 2020. I like them very much.
Well, organised religion yes. But surely peak consumers of all sorts of half baked cod spirituality of all kinds.
“Cod spirituality”? Surely some chips would be in order too?
Don’t worry, the atheists will be bringing shoulders full of them.
The piece of cod which surpasses all understanding
That made me laugh. Didn’t see it coming. Bravo!
There’s no plaice for that, now.
Could be the great irony of our time is that instead of the long predicted death of the Christian religion we might be witnessing the slow death of the Social Justice religion that it spawned some hundred or so years ago. It has become a commonplace on the intellectual Right to view Social Justice as a shadowy penumbra of the Christian religion that birthed it.
Social Justice, as political project, can be viewed as a kind of egalitarian evangelism – a filleted, rationalised re-imagining of Christianity, stripped of enchantment and its transcendent spiritual dimension. ‘God loves us equally’ becoming ‘this life on this earth must be strictly ‘fair’ to each and every one of us’. Maybe what’s beginning to happen now is that Gen Z is noticing that the Social Justice religion’s great egalitarian project never seems to actually deliver what it promised.
Demographers have been predicting this for almost 20 years now- but it’s great that tangible results like this are starting to come through. The greatest predictor of whether a child grows up to be religious is her parent’s faith, or lack thereof. With the exception of a few African countries, human fertility is falling all across the world. ( An interesting Unherd article published last month by Olympia Campbell called this part of an almost 200 year old trend.) Even if you throw in the moderately religious with unbelievers, birth rates are well below replacement levels. But deeply religious families are immune to this decline, having 5 or 6 children on average. This has been a persistent planet-wide trend for decades now, and is likely going to be quite tranformative for global culture.
Oh well done Unherd. You’ve managed to publish yet another article which ignores Islam. Even when it is about religion!
Or is this writer pretending Islam doesn’t exist in UK like all the other contributors? Just look the other way please.
Or, to give my opinion. Ignore something for so long and then this writer isn’t even aware what he is ignoring.
I think he was talking about spirituality, not rule-following.
He’s talking about the declining belief in the Christian religion.
Well there you go then. It’s not about Islam! You don’t half write some twaddle on here. The other post of yours on here: immortals, mortals etc. what’s that gibberish all about?
Well that is my point exactly. In Unherd nothing is about Islam.
The other post is a bit of very old philosophy.
Nobody except you want every article to be about Islam, Starmer or both. Variety is the spice of life, and we like to discuss other topics that may be happening around the globe
I hope you’re not hoping for Islam to replace Christianity, then we’re all doomed.
You are correct. If 99.99% of UnHerd contributors hate the idea of Islam, worry about what it is doing to the world, believe that it is destructive, etc ….. it is a little gauche not to want to understand more of what it is all about. This is also true of other religions but Islam is perhaps more threatening, or appears so and is certainly in the news. So articles about the spread and power of Islam would be quite important in the world today and UnHerd should see this.
Type the word “Islam” into Unherd’s Search facility, there’s plenty of articles and at least some will match that purpose.
Really, you just keep trying to bolster RL for the sake of it, out of a kind of atavistic sympathy.
I’ve also provided links for him to Unherd articles which he claims don’t exist, which he then ignores by claiming they don’t exist the day after… and the day after…
He has just paid his dues like you. None of us is special and if you think you are – you have a lot to learn.
He might have a particular problem, he might disagree with you, he might think that you have too much wind – but his input is as special as yours, which I think is about getting as many upticks as possible. And that is sad.
Uh-oh, the children are fighting again! And this time its about who is the bigger religious bigot!
On you go, lads, have at it!
I usually ignore you but you have hit the nail on the head.
The submission of the Muslim is, in its theory at least, a mere submission. The submission of the Christian – the person who has a trusted Christ – is also a reception. A reception of Christ into the heart by faith. Not just the house swept and put in order, but now housing a new Resident.
Submission is Islam or surrender, it’s mandatory. Christianity is commission, encouraged to commit but not forced. Judaism is law, follow the laws, or not and don’t participate.
> are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”.
We start by clarifying spiritual is not religious, and should not be conflated as such, spiritual is a word I generally used by those who want the comfort of something beyond the material but refuse the sacrifice that comes with actually living a religious life, those John the Revelator characterized as neither hot nor cold.
That being said this is hardly surprising Gen Z gets to live in the age where the New Atheism won, where God was regulated out of everything and seen that when you have nothing left they you owe your loyalty to external of yourself everything that holds us together falls apart. It is the ultimate failure of the Marxist dialectical and the failure of the Frankfurt school, if nothing is real or permanent then there is no real impetus to care for my neighbor. Whereas the Christian creed is that we are all children of God with infinite worth and divine potential and that our souls will endure eternally, and when you realize the man you meet on the street is a Divinity, not to mention that your family and loved ones around you are beings with whom you shall likely spend all of eternity. Well that changes quite a bit of how you act and what you do. Your obligation to your posterity becomes greater, your willingness to serve others increases, and your vision becomes much longer than simply having a good time now.
But hey eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die right?
…and when you realize the man you meet on the street is a Divinity…
“Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of these, dying the life of those.”
We start… by recognising that humans are spiritual beings, due to consciousness and curiosity with how we came to be here. This was a process beginning many, many millennia before what we’d now term ‘religion’ became recognised, through the development of settled habitation, requiring power structures and the use of language and then text to codify religious beliefs.
It’s possible that some young people are turning to these organised structures, but the general search for meaning beyond “bread alone” doesn’t have to involve either the established religions or indeed, any belief in a deity.
Using terms such as “new atheists” is just falling into the trap of those who seek to monitor the waxing and waning of our spiritual lives by labelling them. It means… nothing: there’s just “atheism”. I’m an a-theist, and i’ll take no lessons from anyone on the value of the human spirit and wonder at the wider universe we inhabit – something we absolutely didn’t understand when codified religions were being developed.
Religion is as old as humanity, as any student of prehistory will tell you.
Religion doesn’t begin with power structures or codification – those arrive later.
e.g. the story of Abraham was transferred from Jewish parents to their children by word of mouth for a whole millennium before scribes wrote it down.
e.g. Jesus was crucified at the instigation of those in the religious power structures.
If there’s no God, there’s no purpose or meaning in the universe, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine there is
“Any student of prehistory”?
Nonsense. Religion is the codification of spirituality. As such, it stretches back only as far as the written word. Humanity itself, and the rise of consciousness, predates writing by tens of thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands.
The myopia of religionists is, frankly, risible.
Religion began with an oral history, not a written one.
You sound quite desperate to be right. I hope I’m wrong.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that has “life after death” as a belief.
One of the audience in the Unherd talk with Nick Cave and Tom Holland asked, ‘What happens to us after death?’
What does justice demand? What does love demand? Although both were deeply present in what both men said in their talk, neither featured as a response to the question.
Would it be an abomination if every act of love and friendship that has ever been expressed comes to nothing at death, not even to be remembered as a story?
C S Lewis liked to remind people that our view of God is too small. A mouse regarding an elephant and forgetting how small it was.
One might mistake a person risen from the dead as a divinity. Their presence would be as a shock of nuclear heat and arresting as lighting from a blue sky. Flesh filled with the life of Christ. Against that immoveable reality we would be as an ocean wave shivering into a thousand drops against a granite cliff. Our reality would be transient, ephemeral, a momentary pattern in smoke. ‘Life after death’ is a poor thing in comparison.
Divine love without being humanised would be unbearable. Humanised it’s only just.
The beginning is not, alas, ‘spirituality’, whatever that means. Nick Cave’s wife’s simple confession, “My son has died” is in heart-sympathy the same as the simple confession, “Christ has died”. Yes, he has died. Begin with that.
Christianity is the only one that is “life after death” all the others are “death after death”. Repent and Believe and live.
Lots of religions believe in straight up reincarnation.