The Bohemian Beard Experiment

What is it with bohemians and their beards?

What is it with bohemians and their beards? Whereas the builder, the banker, and the baker are content to be clean-shaven, the bohemian struts around with all manner of facial hair. There are shaggy beards, pointy beards, sculpted beards, even beards with handlebar moustaches. On the eve of my 31st birthday, I decided it was time to see what I was missing out on.

At first, I was apprehensive. The last time I had tried to grow one—ten years ago—the results were laughable. This time, I had a week off work, so I knew I could safely experiment without receiving a barrage of sarcasm. Although growing a beard is a passive thing, people do tend to notice. Indeed, when I returned to work with thicker stubble than usual, I got a few mocking comments. I batted these away by saying I had given up shaving and that the beard was a by-product of laziness rather than an active choice.

So much of life is taken up negotiating the expectations of others rather than just doing what we want to do: we get employable haircuts, we rein in our individuality, we deny entropy, and are imprisoned by the choices we made when we were more impressionable. Only by making a radical change can we discover who we have turned into.

As the beard thickened and accommodated itself to my face, I noticed that strangers treated me differently. Facial hair, the most visible sign of adulthood in men, seemed to confer greater respect. I was no longer what the Ancient Greeks called ‘a beardless boy’, but a citizen. As to people I knew, they were more circumspect. Yet, after a week or so, they accepted it as completely normal and never mentioned it again.

Normality is fluid. The great truth of the bohemians, the knowledge that gives them the confidence to flout conventions and follow their instincts, is that you can do whatever want and the world will carry on. It doesn’t matter what you do, people will get used to it. And, after an awkward couple of weeks, you emerge on the other side as a different person.

This truth—that you can do whatever you like within genetic constraints (there are, let us not forget, men who can’t grow beards)—s incredibly liberating. No longer are you stuck inside who you are: you can be whatever you want, as long as you follow through with the idea. There are people who have changed gender; people who have left jobs, got tattooed to look like a leopard and gone to live on an island, and people who have walked around the world with a ukulele. They did these things by deciding to be different.

Psychologists tell us that, in terms of our perception of time, we have lived half our lives by the age of twenty. After that the days drift by faster and faster. That which was new and exciting turns into dull, mechanical routine. The only way to slow your perception of time, so that the days don’t become indistinguishable, is to have new and different experiences.

Our personalities are formed from a combination of who we are and what other people expect us to be. Playing with those societal expectations allows us to discover the boundaries of the self, investing a sense of anxiety into mundane matters, the anxiety of being alive. For the escapologist there will be many occasions when people question the wisdom of what we/they do. They will comment and they will cast doubt, it will cause you to doubt yourself, but you should not. Instead, experiment with change, even change as frivolous as growing a beard, and gain the confidence to live as you would like.

A man with a patchy beard. Photo by Laura Gonzalez.

This article was originally published in issue five of New Escapologist magazine.

Read my other New Escapologist articles.