Frank Lampard has won three Premier League titles, a Uefa Champions League and amassed more than 100 caps for his country, but the England footballer turned TV pundit looked like the most deflated man on Earth last week when Gary Lineker teased him about his bald patch.
If you haven’t seen the clip, the pair are engaging in some friendly banter during the BBC’s live coverage of Euro 2024 when St Gary, of all people, cruelly tells his panellist “nobody wants to see the back of your head these days, that’s for sure”.
The crumpled expression on Lampard’s face became an overnight meme. While Lineker later admitted to feeling “bad” about his choice of words, the jibe highlighted both the common nature of slagging over hair loss and the acutely miserable sensation that can be brought about by an awareness of going bald.
Yes, there are some bare-templed pin-ups like Stanley Tucci and Dwayne Johnson. But the philosophical writer Alain de Botton – who lost his hair when he was 20 – admits the average man who goes bald resembles “a fragile librarian”.
“For those unhappy with their locks, pictures are painful,” says de Botton. “Each new image brings more bad news.”
Tell me about it. I recall the first time I caught sight of my own thinning crown in a photograph some years ago. I am still getting over the shock and have resolved to never again turn my back on a camera.
The good news is there are lots of treatments for anyone really troubled by hair loss. There’s also philosophy – a timeless and potentially much cheaper way of dealing with any anxiety over thinning gruaig.
This week’s Unthinkable takes the form of a three-point programme, drawn from the wisdom of the ages.
Step one: Apply logic
Okay, so you’re starting to go light on top. But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever be bald. It also doesn’t mean you will never have a head of hair. Not with sorites paradox.
The word sorites derives from the Greek word for “heap” and the paradox is attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, a contemporary of Aristotle. It explores the vagueness of certain terms like “a heap of sand” or “a head of hair”, starting from basic assumptions.
Let’s accept, for example, 100,000 strands of hair (roughly the average on a human head) constitutes a head of hair. What if you’d one fewer strand? Surely that’s a head of hair too. And if 99,999 strands is a head of hair then 99,998 strands is a head of hair. And so on, right down to the last few strands.
The paradox, so framed, leads you to accept that a single strand of hair is a head of hair.
If this sounds a little too desperate – and not the sort of thing that will withstand Lineker-like put-downs in the pub – then proceed to the next step.
Step two: Look at the positive side
De Botton advocates finding a benefit in loss. Writing on the topic, he says “we should let our deficiencies feed our love of beauty. Appreciation tends to be stimulated by lack”.
Implicit in the argument is that losing your hair is undesirable. Going grey at least holds the promise of becoming a sliver fox but who wants to be a partially-thatched eagle?
De Botton argues that, as our own beauty fades, we gain a kind of wisdom and sensibility that young things with their flowing locks could never obtain.
In Buddhism, there is a more practical benefit to hair loss. It is training for letting go of our attachments. Since “life is suffering”, shaving your hair off – as Buddhist monks and nuns do – steels you for inevitable pain ahead.
Anthony de Mello, the Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who died of a heart attack aged 55, wrote: “There is one thing and only one thing that causes unhappiness. The name of that thing is attachment.”
Step three: Acceptance
If step two is not working then it’s time for Stoicism. American writer and podcaster Ryan Holiday – coincidentally born in the same month in 1987 that de Mello died – has done much to popularise ancient Greek thinking in Silicon Valley but don’t hold that against him.
Channelling the collective insights of Epictetus, Seneca and other Stoic greats, Holiday proclaims: “Change isn’t good. The status quo isn’t bad. They just are.”
Easy for him to say with his thick, wavy coif. But the reasoning stands. Unlike step two where you are trying to find consolations in a loss, step three is refusing to accept it’s a loss in the first place.
You couldn’t have had that rich barnet in the past if you didn’t have the dwindling nest that’s there now. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations “everything that happens is related and the same” – and staying in “the present” reminds you of that.
Stoics believe that such incantations can build character, ensuring that comments about your appearance will wash off you like water on a stone.
For Lampard and men in a similar predicament, the advice is rinse and repeat. Repeat Marcus Aurelius, that is: “There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state.”