June 25th 2025 Newsletter
Thought for the week: are you doing all you can to nurture the things that you care the most about?
So the United States, my home country, attacked Iran this weekend. This is not a politics blog and I'm not going to go into the politics of that situation. The only thing I will say is that I hope the violence ends as soon as possible because all life should be protected.
What I am interested in is an internet studier is that apparently a lot of people around the age of 18 to 25 have become convinced that the Iran conflict will result in us instituting the draft. Let's be honest, none of us have any idea what's going to happen tomorrow, the unprecedented can become precedented.
But also the draft hasn't happened since the Vietnam era and is part of the reason that protest during that era ballooned to the size they did and why they hit so many college campuses and why the Kent State situation spiraled out of control. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you've got Google.
So let's agree at least that a draft has not happened in the United States for a lot very long time. A draft not happening for 50 years has to at least make it less likely than it was 50 years ago (lindy effect)
So why are people getting all wrapped up in worrying about it?
You have to understand the context of the United States to understand this kind of paranoia. I believe that this is actually a very American expression of being anti-war.
In the United States, we don't think collectively, look at the current destruction going on of our public health apparatus as well as our limited social safety net and our lack of a socialized medicine system, we're the only one in the western world that doesn't have socialized medicine and and there's a social reason why.
Americans struggle with thinking of themselves as part of a collective, it's part of our national mythology, the cowboy, the rugged individualist, we see ourselves as a nation of individuals rising above circumstances not as a collective unit that works together. It goes back to our founding where Thomas Jefferson imagined America is a land of independent farms spread across this great land.
And there are great things about that sort of idea of individuality. America is set up with lots of freedoms to support individuals in being individuals. But some problems are not well solved by individuals.
And this is where I think the psychosis around the draft connects with our American ideals.
The only way in America to process not wanting to be in war is to say that you don't individually want to be in war. So you say you don't want to be drafted because ultimately you don't want America to be at war and the draft would make it your responsibility. We lack the collective language to be able to oppose war.
But opposing war is not something that can be done alone.
So, young people of America, if you don't want to be drafted, where you should be is in the streets with other young people who don't want to be drafted.
Because what I think you're actually trying to express, though you lack the language and social connections to do it, is that you don't want America to be at war with Iran. And the only way to challenge America being at war with Iran is collectively, arm in arm with your fellow citizens.
You can’t fight the drum beat of war from TikTok in your house. You have to work together. Collective problems require collective solutions.
And now for an awkward transition…
I recently bought my first home and so I also recently bought a lawn mower.
As someone like myself is wont to do, I ventured over to Reddit to see if I could get some consensus from the crowd as to what lawn mower made the most sense for someone forward-thinking and also stupid like myself. Depending on what Reddit thread you landed on, some of them were very pro-electric mower and some were very anti-electric mower. You could call the one group open to change and the other aggressively anti-change. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with waiting to make a move until you're confident things are better, but I found some of the rationale a little lacking.
There were many people ranting and raving at about how much electric mower batteries cost.
I found myself puzzled by this.
Gas mowers have costs too, for instance the actual gas, and they have a lot more parts that can break and need maintenance on them in a combustion engine. An electric mower basically has a battery.
Obviously it's more complicated than that, but many of the people on the Reddit thread were complaining about batteries being expensive. They are.
But to do that calculation property you have to compare them to all of the cost associated with maintenance of the mower as well as probably at some point factoring in performance versus gas.
Not to do the LinkedIn thing but it made me think about how difficult it is to move people over to new technology.
Malcolm gladwell had an episode of his podcast that was talking about Jesuits and the way that they process new information. One of the points he made was that a typical way that people deal with new situations is take their frame of reference and make a quick comparison. But that way of managing new situations has severe limitations.
To compare it to the mower, the simplest way, and the way a lot of these people on reddit do it, was to see that the battery was a NEW cost compared to the gas mower and focus on that. But that’s wrong!
And the question is how do you get past that as someone who’s trying to get people to uptake new technology that might be a frame shift from what they’re used to and which their predominant method of valuing, apples to apples, misses key information.
My theory is that the answer is somewhere in over explanation. Particularly when you're in something and you're tech oriented, you may assume people understand a lot more than they actually do. You have to start at Step 0, not Step 5.
Give them something to grasp onto and they might be willing to go with you.
We are all products of our experiences. One of my experiences was spending about 10 years working in higher education. I’m constantly surprised by how this experience sneaks up in my work now, which, post career pivot, could not be more different.
I spent a lot of time during my time in higher education working to support the assessment department, which does a variety of things but one of those functions is helping departments assess whether they’d achieved their goals.
One of the foundational beliefs of assessment is that assessments that don’t drive action are useless.
I now work on a tool called Cropwise Sustainability that assesses the sustainability of supply chains for food companies.
One thing I built into the app is recommendations on what to do next based on your assessment.
Again, the goal is action. Because assessments that don’t drive action don’t matter.
Interesting analysis that draft fears are an individualistic expression of anti-war thoughts and how America’s founding mythologies feed into the lack of collective expression.