The metric system is not worth adopting. Some might argue that the metric system offers easy conversions, but that isn’t particularly useful.  How often are you going to need to know how many meters there are in sixty kilometers? The answer is just as often as you’ll want to know how many yards there are in sixty miles: almost never. Think about how your math teacher will add tricky conversions to make a problem harder. A question might give everything in feet, but then go on to ask for the answer in miles. If everyone were to adopt the metric system, would such problems go away? No. Nothing will stop a math teacher from making something harder, especially if there’s no practical use for it. So if our math classes remain just as tedious, and would now force us to learn archaic ways of measuring, why bother switching in the first place?

Of course, your world will not always center around high school math class. If your job requires regular conversions between scales of measurement, then metric will be helpful. But for the rest of us who have not grown up using the metric system, it would be hard to adopt without always relating everything back to inches or pounds or ounces or other familiar Imperial units. Take temperature, for example. Celsius makes sense if you’re interested in the freezing and boiling points of water, but most of us care more about air temperature, for which Fahrenheit is more finely tuned. A warm summer day is 28 degrees? Having 100 degrees signal a really hot day, or a fever, just makes sense.

The metric system may seem easier to use because it’s in our familiar base ten. Consider, however, the advantages of base twelve. It makes multiplication and division so much easier, since twelve has more divisors than any number less than itself. Fractions break down more cleanly. In base twelve, halves, thirds, fourths, and sixths all work out without unwieldy decimals. Gone are your days of writing ⅓ as 0.33 repeating; now it’s just 0.4 (⅓ of twelve). So, if you’re thinking about switching to the metric system for all of its affordances in calculation, instead consider switching to base twelve. Beyond the mathematical, base twelve is also a much more sensible base for everyday life. Not only do eggs come in dozens, but much of our quotidian infrastructure is already built around base twelve: just look at your clock, calendar, or Western music scale.

Advocates of metric will say that their system is more rational, simpler. Everyday life and custom, however, has its own demands, for which the Imperial system works more than just fine. If one does desire a rational scheme for calculation, adopting base twelve would be superior to buying into the metric system.