For the second time this year, I had the opportunity to go home and visit Iran.

I usually don’t have the opportunity to go back this frequently (I have a full time job and a life), but the 12 Day War dramatically changed my perspective on my priorities & I made it happen at the first available opportunity. I needed to go hug my family and friends in person and tell them that I loved them, I needed to go walk in the neighborhoods I loved so dearly, and I needed to get some sort of closure from the nightmare in the summer.

This mattered to me more than anything in the world.

I’ve included a summary of my observations below.

I’ve divided these into four broad categories – the aftermath of the war, changes in living standards, the relationship between the rulers and ruled, and social changes. As I stated in my post in January, the final category, social changes, is the most important. Everything else is just a footnote compared to it.

#1 – The Aftermath of the War

Walking through Tehran, one would not get the impression there was a war here just a few months ago.

There weren’t any widespread destruction or ruins. At one point someone pointed towards a space in the distance between several buildings and told me there used to be an apartment building there that was hit by Israel in the war. I wouldn’t have noticed that in a million years had it not been pointed at to me.

When I went to see Qods Square in Tajrish (where a famous video showed a water line explode as a result of a bombing and shoot several cars into the air), everything was normal. Not only was there no sign of that destruction, but I saw several new structures in the area that weren’t there 9 months ago.

The biggest physical indication of the war was from the billboards and city decorations. The municipality had put up several different displays relating to the war throughout the city. In every city I traveled, there were pictures of the different military commanders and nuclear scientists that had been killed put prominently in different places.

In some cases, these were combined with photos of other major figures that had been killed in other events in the past few hours.

For example, one large billboard featured General Soleimani along with the figures killed in the 2024 helicopter crash (President Raisi, and Foreign Minister Abdollahian) and several figures from the current war (General Hajizadeh, General Salami, Dr. Abbasi, and others). One could not help but think about the very rapid pace of change in the past 2 years & how much Iran’s geopolitical situation had deteriorated.

In contrast to the physical state of the city, I did see very deep marks left by the war in the psyche of the people.

Many of the people I talked to had clear signs of PTSD. It was very common to hear people talk about difficulty sleeping (over a dozen people told me they couldn’t sleep without pills since the war) & being startled at loud noises.

Most Iranians frame of reference for the conflict was the Iran-Iraq War. There were several differences in the 12 Day War compared to that conflict.

During the Iran-Iraq War people from Khuzestan and other provinces to the west had fled to Tehran. The 12 Day War was the opposite – huge amounts of people had left Tehran to smaller cities (including in the west).

Anecdotally, it seemed to me the people that were the most terrified and had immediately left Tehran were ones who were young kids during the Iran-Iraq War and still had memories of the terrors of the Iraqi bombings (people in their early 40s). Though it should be noted that almost all of them had returned to Tehran before the war finished.

In contrast when I talked with people that were older & had been adults during the Iran-Iraq war they all agreed that the missiles from the 8 year war were far worse than the 12 day one, with a few prominent exceptions – specifically the Evin Prison Bombing.

I encountered widespread fury over the Evin Strike.

People that lived nearby were said the force of the explosion was unlike anything they had encountered (in many cases their houses were damaged). I heard a story from several people about a daughter that had visited her father who was imprisoned in Evin for debt (not any political crime) on that day. First her mother had visited him & then went to the car while she went to visit. Then Israel’s bombs hit – killing the daughter instantly (her head was separated from her body). Both the mother and imprisoned father survived.

I also heard several people say the last day of the war was more terrifying than any other and the bombings were far more intense than what they had experienced before.

At the same time, there was also a widespread sentiment that Israel knew exactly what it was hitting, and this was not a war of the cities.

As a pro government friend described to me, “Fighting Israel is not like fighting the Taliban where they randomly shoot at different parts of the city. They had precise intelligence and weapons. Every single strike was intentional and had a purpose”.

This didn’t mean that there was not collateral damage in houses nearby or certain neighborhoods, but most people were convinced that if they were not near any strategic sites or homes of important people then they would not blindly be killed.

Of course, this did not diminish from the terror of the noises and explosions. A friend of mine who lived near what turned out to be military buildings (he didn’t know this at the time) described the sheer terror of having several buildings near him collapse from explosions & how he was not able to speak for hours from the shock.

Another person told me that the scariest part for them was the few days that Tehran was completely empty.

He described leaving his home in the morning to buy bread and not hearing any sounds but birds.

This was extremely eerie in his normally crowded and loud neighborhood. He joked that he kept looking behind cars to see that there weren’t any zombies waiting to jump on him.

People’s experiences varied widely based on where they lived and what they did for a living.

There were people in some cities to the east of the country that didn’t experience anything beyond a crowd of fleeing Tehranis coming to their town for a week.

At the same time, a nurse that I know in Tehran sent their family to the provinces and spent the entire war working in the hospital. He described how the hospital had set up temporary housing in the parking lot where he would sleep between shifts.

A common refrain I heard was people hoping to entirely black out those 12 days from their memory and never have to think about them again.

One final point in this section - I had seen several people on YouTube debating whether Israeli jets had actually flown deep over Iranian soil, or whether the explosions were from drones and missiles.

I talked to a great number of people, both in Tehran and places surrounding it, who explicitly told me the heard low flying jets. In every case I asked them to clarify that they weren’t drones, but they were very certain what they heard were jets.

#2 Changes in Living Standards

A common joke I heard was, “Life in Iran is hard. Some days we don’t have gas. Some days we don’t have electricity. Some days we don’t have water. And some days we have all three of these, but instead we have missiles falling on our heads!”.

While this is an exaggeration, the decline in living standards in the past year and a half is a very stark reality in the lives of Iranians. Iran has always had its difficulties, but things have never (at least in my lifetime) deteriorated to this level.

By the time I got to Iran the temperature had cooled down and the blackouts of the summer were over. However, while I was in Tehran, we had water cut off from about 2 am to 8 am twice a week (I did not encounter this in any other cities). The exact times and duration of the water outages varied based on neighborhood, with wealthier areas typically having less outages and poor areas having more.

The magnitude of the water shortage can be seen in that even though we are well into autumn – there still hasn’t been a drop of rain in Tehran this season. Only a few years ago there would have several large rainstorms by this time.

I heard from several people that their household appliances had been damaged due to the frequent power outages in the summer. Evidently the judiciary does have a system set up for citizens to get compensated if they could prove something failed due to blackouts. However, this process required lots of bureaucratic steps & time. One of my relatives had tried to start this because their AC broke but ended up getting annoyed at the complexity of the process and didn’t end up going through.

Environmental deterioration was not limited to a lack of water. When I drove into Ahvaz one morning, I witnessed a strange smoke that covered the city and gave everything an unnerving post-apocalyptic look. The smoke was from fires in the Hoor al-Azim wetlands that span across both Iran and Iraq. The official explanation was that these were from fires on the Iraqi side because they refused to take steps to protect the area. This smoke had been in the city for weeks and led to widespread respiratory issues for the residents.

Utilities and environmental problems are just one part of the issue. The Iranian economy remains in deep crisis. Large companies and government organizations suffer from a lack of liquidity - meaning that they cannot pay their contractors on time. In one case I heard of a municipality of a small city paying for services by giving away land on the outskirts of the city in lieu of payment.

The average person, particularly those on fixed salaries, struggle to make ends meet. Repeated devaluation of the toman and high inflation means that food takes up a huge part of people’s budgets – taking up most of their salaries. One frequently wonders how much more pressure the working class can reasonably take.

Many bazaaris I met got by through getting as many loans as they could as the start of the year. They then invest that money in gold or other commodities. The rise of gold combined with inflation eating way the value of the toman means each payment becomes easier with time – allowing them to take a larger loan next year. One person joked with me that they made more money like this than through their actual business and that he wasn’t even sure why he bothered to work.

Iran’s mixed state run, free market economy sometimes is so bizarre that it gives what I can only describe as a late Soviet feel. Nowhere is this more evident than buying cars.

Someone that wants to buy a new car has to enter a raffle to then get the opportunity to buy it (and will sometimes stay in line for years). There are certain conditions which allow someone to have a greater chance (like having a new child). If one finally buys the car, they can usually sell it for a significant profit. The entire process of buying a car, new or old, is very much a gamble because depending on when the next inflationary spike is – one’s used car may end up getting more valuable than what it was originally bought for, or one may sell their car at the wrong time and then have new cars suddenly spike up in price and get stuck.

And this isn’t even getting into the complications of importing foreign cars, free trade zones, and tariffs.

Despite these problems, I was also surprised to see the ease to which industries were able to get around sanctions. Even with all the cat and mouse games they face, there is a fairly successful sanctions busting industry. Companies are able to buy fairly specialized equipment with far lower markups than I expected. This included certain AI applications that I was frankly shocked to see. While sanctions clearly ruin the lives of ordinary people, advanced industry is able to find ways around them.

#3 - The Relationship between the Rulers and Ruled

Throughout large parts of Iranian society there is a deep lack of confidence in the government's ability to solve the problems Iran current faces.

This isn’t new, but has significantly exacerbated with the electricity & water shortages and then the experience of the war. And this lack of confidence has turned into strong feelings of vulnerability.

At the same time, the government has used up almost all its social capital and lacks the ability to push major changes in society.

This isn’t just seen in the case of its massive retreat on social issues (more on this in the next section). If it wants to fix the utilities crises, there needs to be major behavioral changes among the people.

A big portion of the water shortage relates to farming. The average Iranian also uses up more water than is sustainable in their daily life. Years ago, the government may have had the ability to force certain changes. But this is no longer the case – fearing protests, there is only so much it can push.

This mistrust applies to other parts of society too.

Bazaaris have a rule that they believe anytime the Head of the Central Bank gives a public talk, they assume that means the toman is about to collapse further (I thought it was amusing to compare this to when Powell speaks).

Iran has a huge public sector, with millions of people working for the government. Again and again, I heard stories from people working in different government offices facing extreme fury and distrust from the larger populace (for things that they couldn’t control and didn’t deserve to be hated for).

For example, a friend of mine that is an electrical engineer who works for the Ministry of Energy joked to me that he’d have to hire bodyguards next year.

He told me how almost every day in the summer, angry people would burst into their offices due to anger at the power outages.

On two different occasions someone walked into his room and turned off his AC out of anger. These people refused to believe that there were also power outages in his neighborhood, and his family also had to suffer.

One complaint I heard from these different government workers (mid career technical professionals in their 30s and 40s) was that their managers were not very qualified and picked for reasons like favoritism.

Even if they were ‘good people’ they lacked the visions and skills to properly lead & would easily be misled by ambitious career climbers below them (leading to bad decision making).

On a macro level it seems like the government has no long term strategy and vision and is in permanent crisis management mode. During the Khatami era, there was a famous phrase that the government faced one national crises every 9 days. Now it seems that this has flipped, and the government faces 9 crises every day.

It seems like the only plan that applies across the board is to delay things and just somehow survive day by day until Trump is gone.

Even for something simple like dealing with problems for chicken farmers, the entire cabinet meets week after week and doesn’t seem to be able to come up with any solution to the problem (we all know the ultimate outcome will be to bring up the price).

The government and people seem stuck in a position of uncertainty where they are neither fully in peace nor at war.

In a sense the entirety of Iran has been trapped in a “Groundhog Day” like scenario for two decades where no matter what we do, we end up in the same place.

Whether the government compromises and enters a deal with the West (2015) or doesn’t and fights a war (2025), then end result is the same.

And we just go into another reiteration of the same debates, over negotiations vs resistance and self sufficiency vs global integration (it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, we’ll be arguing the same points in a few years).

There have been all sorts of claims about whether the government expected an all out war to break out. My sense is that they thought a limited conflict may be possible, but did not think it would be as fierce and destructive as what happened.

There still seems to be widespread confusion about what happened and what is coming next. I heard an IRGC affiliated speaker in a religious ceremony very seriously claim that Israel’s true goal was to kill the entire country’s leadership and then make Hassan Rouhani their puppet ruler. Personally, I have some doubts about this.

Most people seem to think the war is not over and fighting will break out again soon (this is fanned by blatant misinformation that spreads online, something I have repeatedly condemned).

The government appears to have taken at least the possibility of this seriously.

A friend of mine that works in a large pharmaceutical plant has been working almost non stop overtime shifts (he doesn’t even come home some days of the week) because the Ministry of Health has ordered increased production of certain essentially medicines to have a big enough stockpile in case war breaks out.

4 – Social Changes

A lot of people who haven’t been to Iran for years (or foreign reporters) tend to immediately notice the de facto end of mandatory hijab. Honestly at this point this is old news.

As I wrote in my January post, things have moved far past a few strands of hair. It is pretty common to see young girls wearing short sleeve t-shirts or having their midriffs exposed. And in some cases, wearing bare tank tops. Or for men to wear shorts.

Not just in the streets, openly in front of the police, but in official settings, like banks and airports.

That doesn’t mean that no one faces any repercussions, particularly in smaller cities.

There have been some half-hearted attempts in the past few years to crack down on clothing, whether through fines or physical force, but these immediately fail. As a young friend told me, this limited freedom of dress was not something that was granted by the government, for it to be taken away by them. It was taken by force, through a very high price, by the people, and will not be given back.

What is far more common is for businesses to face consequences.

I know of several cafes in small cities that were shut down because young boys and girls would mix there without hijab. Even in high end Tehran cafes, the workers will almost always ask not to be included in photos (while they openly don’t wear hijab in real life, if pictures of this spread online then they could face problems).

What is clear is that the lines of conflict have clearly shifted – the government has massively retreated on social issues & everyone knows this is a losing battle.

Another thing I noticed this time was the significantly higher number of very openly gay and trans people.

On the metro I saw an effeminately dressed guy wink at another man .. who turned visibly red and winked back at him. Even for me, this was somewhat shocking and not something I expected to see outside Park Daneshjoo.

I saw several clearly trans women (M to F) all over the city (including holding hands with other men). Iran has legally allowed this for years, but it wasn’t very socially accepted or common. Surprisingly I even saw a trans man (F to M) – not in Tehran but a small city.

In North Tehran, on several different days I saw very butch looking young women holding hands with super feminine looking friends. I don’t want to say this is unprecedented, but I was not used to seeing these things so commonly and so in the open.

Another growing change I’ve seen in society has been the spread of belief in shamans, magic, jinns, and all sorts of unconventional supernatural ideas. This is a direct consequence of a loss of faith in the clergy, who traditionally distinguish between ‘true faith’ and ‘superstition’.

There has also been an exponential increase in belief in non-traditional, reformist interpretations of Islam (what I’d call the Protestantization of faith). But there’s also all sorts of other beliefs.

There are all sorts of different types of healers who use things like “energy treatment” or “ancient medicine” to treat people for a variety of different ailments.

At one point I encountered a real life story that seemed straight out of a horror movie, where a family was convinced they had been cursed two generations ago and based on the ‘visions’ of a ‘spiritual medium’ dug up a strange book out of the ruins of an old house & then set it on fire at midnight in a graveyard, causing them to feel like an evil spirit left them (no obviously I don’t believe there was anything supernatural involved, but they 100% did, and I thought it was absolutely fascinating).

The younger generation of Iranians (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) are also fascinating. They tend to be terminally online & largely live in the same culture other people their age around the world do – obsessed with matcha, Labubus, Bridgerton, Stranger Things, Billie Eilish, and all sorts of Korean and Japanese music and movies which I frankly don’t recognize.

It was not unusual in the least to hear teenagers talking about how much they hate Swifties (this is a big enough thing in Iran for there to be competing stan and hater factions) or to see young girls with semicolon tattoos they said were inspired by Selena Gomez.

In a sense, they are not that different than my own generation (millennials) who also were heavily into Western music and movies, except that they are far more open about their lifestyles (and more online).

People my age frequently had girlfriends and went to parties too, but it was something that was typically hidden from elders or not paraded about. These kids don’t feel the need to hide any of it.

Additional Observations

I spoke to several university lecturers who talked about the significant increase in Iraqi students in Iranian universities.

Iraqis have to pay a far higher tuition than Iranian students (but one that is fairly cheap for them). Accepting them has been a good source of revenue for universities and also allows them to advertise that they are “International Universities”.

The lecturers I talked to often liked the students, but also talked about significant language barriers, because the Iraqis typically were neither good at Persian, nor English. In the case of the people I talked to, they had an Arabic speaking Ahvazi student who made a small fortune translating all the Iraqis papers into Persian.

There were some rumors among ordinary people that the government was paying these Iraqis and they were secretly training them to become part of the Popular Mobilization Forces. This had also led to some protests against them in Hamadan and other cities.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A dean of one school very openly told me that they would not be able to afford to pay their staff if it wasn’t for the increased tuition from the Iraqis.

Finally, one last observation was that there were significantly less Afghans that I saw in Iran. I was told that the mass deportations of the past few months had led to a significant slowdown in the construction sector.

Conclusion

Iran is going through a very difficult time, both in terms of its geopolitical standing and domestic situation.

At the same time, the rapid pace of change in people’s values and norms – whether religious or secular, young or old – continues to speed up.

The remarkable thing about this change is that is has come directly from the people – not imposed top down by the state (as has been the case in so much of Iran’s history), nor from foreign powers.

What makes me the happiest is seeing someone dressed without a scarf and in a very Westernized way standing side by side with their best friend who chooses to wear a full hijab and dress traditionally. And there is no tension between them & each chooses to value the other and their choices.

This is a harmony Iranian society has been robbed of for a long time & is finally starting to return.

Whatever change happens in Iran’s future (and rest assured, there will be massive changes, however they ultimately manifest themselves) it will come neither from out of touch exiled opposition figures, nor from crumbs thrown by reformist politicians, nor from the bombs of Trump and Netenyahu or their soft war efforts.

Rather the change will come from inside, from family settings, and the heart of society itself.

This type of change is far more durable and effective than any alternative.