It’s obviously a funny quote, but I kind of get where Da Vinci was coming from. He was brilliant enough to master like 10 different disciplines. If you’re THAT capable, maybe you look at an impact like the one Da Vinci had during his life and find it to be a failure. I mean, today we remember Da Vinci primarily because of (1) the Mona Lisa and (2) the inventions in his notebooks, but you have to remember that his notebooks weren’t published until after his death, and the Mona Lisa wasn’t nearly as renowned as it is now until after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. He spent a lot of his life designing weapons that were never built for a Duke who was overthrown. Da Vinci’s fame as the ultimate Renaissance man is largely a posthumous phenomenon.
the r/bald subreddit is an example of wholesome masculine body-positivity
every post is a guy showing his clearly-past-the-point-of-no-return thinning hair & asking "is it time?" and the top reply is always this image