I pretty much went through the same thing, it sucks. There is definitely a social impact, especially when dating, but also in other areas. When you turn on the

I pretty much went through the same thing, it sucks. There is definitely a social impact, especially when dating, but also in other areas. When you turn on the TV, how do you figure out whether a non-hero character is a bad guy? If he's bald, he always is. There is definitely a heavy cultural bias against bald people. Aesthetics is a big part of it though. People with hair can pull off a lot of looks that simply are grotesque on bald people, but the good news is: it's something you do have control over. The worst thing you can do when bald is being fat. So work out, and wear nice clothes. These things matter a lot more when you're bald, you'll notice the impact immediately. In fact, these things matter a lot more as you get older in general. Confidence is another thing you can actively work on. People tune you out if you think you're not interesting. While the deck is stacked against you a little bit due to things outside your control, the biggest impact on your confidence is, well, your confidence. If all else fails, learn to imitate confident people and don't be discouraged by failure. One of the things you can learn from observing confident people is that their failure rate is not actually that low, for the most part they are just really good at concealing or downplaying failure. If you suck at networking, that's not due to baldness, it's because you don't enjoy networking to begin with, because you don't have a lot of practice, or because you get discouraged easily. I can identify with that, but believe me it's something that gets better if you're determined to become better at it. A certain percentage of people will never date you, never trust you, never want to listen to you. This applies to everybody on the planet. Sure, that percentage will be much lower for a non-bald good-looking person, but the essence of the fact remains: you can't make everybody like you. Try to train your internal classifier and filter for those whom you can build a relationship with. Attempting to win over people who reflexively dislike you is a fool's errant; there are lot of "low hanging fruit" you can pick up instead using a fraction of the energy. The nice thing about people who make a lot of snap categorizations on a whim, like never date|befriend|trust|invest in|talk to a guy who has attribute X, is they come around just as fast if they see you're successful. A lot of people only like you when you win, so go out and pick battles you can win. The goal is, much like doing a startup, to make it unreasonably expensive for people to dislike you.