I'm seriously asking here because a lot of guys on this forum talk about the day-to-day constant social assault on their hair loss, and I never get a straight answer, how many people would you say, as a rough estimate, actually look at your head, or give signals off, that show they are instantly consumed by your baldness?
When you say it all happens "subconsciously" well, there's no way of you knowing that.
This is the point. Think about how you might talk to a very attractive woman with big breasts and a tiny waist versus how you would talk to a fat 55 year old woman with a raspy voice.
Are you sitting there consumed by this woman's age and fat body? No. But do you automatically put her into a different category in your mind? YES.
Now this isn't a big problem if you are a 55 year old man and receding looks normal on you.
If you are a 20 or even 30 something year old man trying to look his best to get laid, to get a job, to sell a product, to act in a movie (for those of us in such businesses where image matters even more)- the balding, the baldness, makes people put you into that category. I am not extremely short, but I'm not tall. I'm not ugly, but I'm not great looking. One of the things people always commented on was that I had nice hair. Now I have ****ty hair, and my only other future option if I can't save it is to shave it- and I have a big (seriously it's huge) pale head. No matter how jacked I get, it will always look terrible.
So people aren't going to point at my dome and go OMG BALD. But they will put me in a category, and to get out of that category I have to work 2, 3, 4 times as hard to even climb out of that then if I simply had hair.
Yes, this sounds very silly, doesn't it? Well, I never thought this way when I had hair, because I never thought about how bald men were treated. But this is the reality.
A fat girl can lose weight. I can't work hard to grow my hair back, I can only try treatments and cross my fingers. Shaving is great if your head is tan and small and well shaped. This is not most white men. It just isn't.