Sara Nelson wasn’t supposed to be a flight attendant. In 1996, she was training to be a teacher in St. Louis, Missouri, and working in an inner-city school as a substitute while she waited to qualify in the fall. She was 23 years old, but she was already exhausted. She worked three other jobs on rotation alongside her main job and her college work, and all she could think about was retirement. That’s when a chance phone call from a friend changed her life.It was a typically biting Midwestern winter and the snow was thick on the ground that February when a former school friend called her from Miami Beach. “I’m calling you with my toes in the sand, sitting here in my bikini,” her friend told her, laughing; she’d taken a job as a flight attendant with United Airlines a couple of years before. Sara looked out at the inhospitable St. Louis weather and rolled her eyes, but her friend continued. She described the flexibility of the job, the excellent healthcare and the strong pension, which you could take as early as 50.Sara perked up most when she heard about the early retirement. She perked up so much, in fact, that she ended up getting into her car, driving to the United offices in Chicago, and interviewing for the same job as her friend. Her career in aviation began almost immediately.It was a great time to become a flight attendant. There were still sexist rules — women were expected to wear high heels and maintain a certain weight — but the job offered good benefits, capped hours and a strong sense of community. Sara and her friends flew around the country, spending layovers on beaches, at baseball games and catching $1 movies. On board, passengers were treated to an experience that now seems almost fantastical: in first class, flight attendants carved roasts in the aisle and poured glasses of Dom Perignon, and even in economy, they had time to talk to passengers for hours.The job had not always offered such security. One older flight attendant once told Sara she had spent 18 months secretly keeping her young child in an airplane closet. But by the late 1990s, the union had secured strong protections, particularly for women, LGBT staff and working parents. Flight attendants made their best friends and met their life partners in the skies.Sara Nelson, still in the midwestern snow of winter, dressed in the then-uniform for United Airlines after getting the job (Sara Nelson)Sara Nelson (left) places roses on the 9/11 memorial for United flight attendants alongside other current and former FAs in 2025 (Association of Flight Attendants-CWA)Very early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, Sara landed in Chicago from the West coast. She had a three-hour break before her next job, so she went to the airport Hilton, where the staff let her nap on a massage table in the spa before it opened. She lay down, closed her eyes, and the next thing she knew, someone was shaking her awake.“An airplane has just flown into the World Trade Center,” a member of the Hilton staff said, urgently. “We thought you’d like to know.”Surely, she thought to herself, it was a small plane and a terrible accident. But as she sat up and turned on the TV, where news anchors were pointing cameras at the North Tower and speculating about what could have possibly happened, she realized this was something different. As she watched in confusion and horror, a second airplane — United Flight 175 — suddenly appeared from out of shot and hit the South Tower. It was staffed with all of her friends.From ‘near-abroad’ to ‘far-abroad’When Akhmed Ismailov* was growing up in the Soviet Union, a VCR was a status symbol. It was, he remembers, kind of like having a Ferrari. Akhmed’s family had both a VCR and a cassette player, and those two pieces of equipment sustained him through his teenage years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He would get a hold of copies of foreign movies, slide them into the VCR, and then watch with fascination as people’s lives from beyond the Iron Curtain played out onscreen. Akhmed’s family had traveled around the USSR for family vacations, but he didn’t have a good understanding of what it was like to live in London, Paris, or the United States. As he sat down in front of those movies, he’d study the day-to-day of western people’s lives like an intrepid anthropologist.But there was one thing Akhmed loved even more than the VCR, more than really anything in the world: rock music. He and his friends would pass around cassette tapes, recordings of recordings of recordings made from radio shows in western Europe. The quality, needless to say, was appalling. The cassette tapes would come with handwritten lyrics on thin pieces of paper that slid inside the cases — or at least the best approximation of the lyrics that teenagers in the USSR, with only a mid-level grasp of English and a fuzzy recording to work off, could discern. Akhmed still remembers eagerly unfolding the paper for Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, only to be left perplexed: The entire thing was a jumble of nonsense, with “just gotta get right out of here” transcribed as “she’s gonna get right Arabian”. He shook his head to himself, wondering: What does being Arabian have to do with any of this?Working out the lyrics to his favorite songs gave Akhmed motivation to learn English. His first language was Russian but his father was convinced that learning English would be key to his son’s success in the future, and he insisted that Akhmed take special lessons in high school. Where Akhmed grew up — he prefers to keep his real name and exact hometown anonymous, since he works in high-level diplomacy now — was an unstable part of the USSR. Terrorist shootings and bombings had happened enough that seeing armed police on public transportation was normal. He and his family, Muslims with obviously Islamic names, were sometimes viewed with suspicion. As he grew older, he began to understand why his father was so determined that he should move somewhere safer, more stable, more cosmopolitan.In the Soviet Union, there was “near-abroad” and “far-abroad.” Most people had been “near-abroad” — to other Soviet bloc countries — but the first time Akhmed went “far-abroad” was when he visited England at the age of 21, to continue studying English. It was 1995, and he had an idea of what London would be like from the video tapes he’d watched on his home VCR.It lived up to the hype. Akhmed loved England: he loved the scenery, the culture, the people, and the freedom. He quickly became fluent in English, and he made friends who he traveled round other western European countries with in their spare time: France, Germany, Greece. There were little moments of culture shock — he remembers being horrified when he saw British students walk into their dorm rooms and recline on their beds with their shoes still on — but for the most part, he found that he fit right in. He returned to his home country three years later, utterly charmed by the experience. He met his future wife, got married, and started applying for jobs in other countries, equipped with his now-excellent grasp of English — and in 1998, he received a prestigious job offer in New York. Akhmed remembers landing in the U.S. and being vaguely disappointed. The place seemed messier than western Europe: the produce wasn’t as fresh, the streets weren’t as clean. His point of view softened, however, as he found New York catered spectacularly to that perpetual love of his life, rock music. There were gigs every night in the city: the tickets were always cheap and the music was always good, with world-famous bands routinely stopping at bars only minutes away from his new home. The Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in the background. The Twin Towers collapsed Sept. 11, 2001 after being damaged by two hijacked planes (AFP via Getty Images)On 9/11, Akhmed got on the subway in Queens around 8:30 am, the air still and the weather clear around him. While he was underground, both planes hit the Twin Towers. He emerged, minutes later, into midtown Manhattan, where hundreds of people were crowded in the streets and shouting about a plane hitting a building.Trying to make sense of the confusion, Akhmed jogged across the street to the nearest diner, which was the closest place he knew with a TV. He jostled with a large group of other people to get a view of the screen, straining his neck to get a glimpse of the news, which was running on repeat. There, he saw the wreckage of two planes in the World Trade Center, and began to understand that something terrible had happened. He stood elbow-to-elbow with the other patrons, staring wordlessly at the burning holes in the buildings — and then they watched in real time, together, as the first tower began to collapse.‘Our nation is under attack’On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Meaghan Higgins did the same thing she did every morning: she walked for 15 minutes to middle school, and picked up her friends on the way. Meaghan lived in the leafy, suburban commuter town of Westfield, New Jersey, where she and her younger sister always had the freedom to ride their bikes around the neighborhood or go to the park to play guitar, so long as they shouted back to their parents where they were headed. Middle school starts early in New Jersey: the kids were at their desks by 8 a.m. Meaghan’s dad, Tom, had left for work in Midtown Manhattan about the same time. It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, temperate with clear blue skies, and Tom was on his second day back to work after taking some family leave following the death of his mother. He wasn’t sad to be back at work: everyone had been kind to him, and it was nice to be back in his old routine.Meaghan and her friends began their classes at eight, but by nine, something in the atmosphere had changed. The teachers started acting strangely. After a while, they started walking around the school, turning off every TV and radio in the building.When the first kid was called to the principal’s office over the loudspeaker, everyone yelled out a sarcastic: “Ooooh!” It was the usual response: a bunch of thirteen-year-old eighth graders reveling in the idea that someone might have been caught in some kind of trouble. But then the loudspeaker went off again. And one by one, more and more classmates got up from their desks confusedly, walked out the door, and didn’t return. Meaghan and her friends turned to each other, narrowing their eyes and repeating the same phrase: “Something is definitely up.”In Manhattan, Tom had just sat down at his desk when his brother called his office phone from Maine. As soon as he picked up, his brother said: “Tommy, did you see a plane flew into the World Trade Center?”“Wow,” said Tom. “What was it, some idiot in a tiny thing that got too close?”“It looks like it was a jet,” said his brother, with worry in his voice.Spectators look up as the World Trade Center goes up in flames Sept. 11, 2001 in New York City after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in an alleged terrorist attack (Getty Images)“That’s crazy,” said Tom, dismissively. “There’s no way.” So sure was he that it couldn’t have happened that he ended up talking with his brother for a few more minutes about their mother and other family things, before Tom realized that everyone else in his office had run to the corner office, where there was a direct view to the World Trade Center. And as he watched the faces of his co-workers change, receiver still pressed to his ear, Tom realized that what his brother had heard was true.A few minutes later, someone shouted that one of the towers was collapsing. At that point, Tom put his head in his hands. His first thought: I’m so glad Mom isn’t alive to see this. Then, as he got up and slowly walked to the corner office with trepidation, the second tower came down in front of him: he watched the fire and the smoke, and then a huge dust cloud emerging from the wreckage. Immediately, he began to cry. His second thought: Whoever is smart enough to have done this is smart enough to wipe out the whole of Manhattan. I’ll never see my wife and kids again.At school, Meaghan sat in her classroom among the friends who hadn’t been called to the principal’s office. And then, outside the window, a strange thing began to happen: all the high school kids — whose building was just along the road from theirs — began filing past their window, first in small groups and then in droves. Tom Higgins, pictured with his wife Karen in 2026, at the 50th anniversary celebration of his brother and sister-in-law's marriage. It was Tom's brother who called him on the morning of 9/11 to inform him that, a few streets away, a plane had just hit the first tower of the World Trade Center (Tom Higgins)Meaghan would find out later that, unlike the middle school, the high school had been dismissed almost as soon as they arrived for the day. The panicked high school principal had announced over the intercom: “Our nation is under attack,” and told everyone to go home. The teens left school and congregated on the grass outside the two school buildings, talking among themselves, trying to work out whether they were actually in danger. The middle schoolers watched them gathering through their own class windows with unsettled curiosity.Middle school continued until 2 p.m., their usual dismissal time, when the large doors opened and an unfamiliar sight greeted the students: a sea of moms and dads, their faces pinched with grief and anxiety. Meaghan remembers thinking: Why are you all here?Meaghan’s mom wasn’t in the throng. She was still at home, trying to get in contact with Tom, so Meaghan caught up with one of her best friends, Chris, whose mom was there with the family’s new puppy. She said hi to Chris’s mom and bent down to pet the little dog, and then Chris’s mom started telling them what had happened: how two commercial airliners had flown into the World Trade Center, how the buildings had collapsed and potentially thousands of people had died. Meaghan knelt in the grass, taking in the news and fussing the puppy while it chewed playfully on the ends of her hair. Even then, she was aware of the bizarre juxtaposition: the existential horror and the unknowing joy of the little dog; the urge to ask for more information about what had happened in Manhattan and the natural inclination to pet a cute puppy.Meaghan’s other best friend, Kyler, overheard what Chris’s mom was telling them.“The World Trade Center?” she said, immediately. “But that’s where my dad works.”She wasn’t the only one.The grim trek downtownStefan Schweinfest moved to New York from Germany in 1989, but by 2001, when he was 40 years old, he still didn’t have a state ID. He’d never bothered to get his driver’s permit in the U.S. — he lived in New York, where nobody had a car, so why bother? — and he rarely needed to show proof of his identity anywhere else. His German passport, with its diplomatic visa, stayed ensconced in the top drawer in his apartment in the East Village, where he lived in a brownstone on Fifth Street with his partner, Luis.Stefan’s parents had had a tough upbringing in post-war Germany, and lived through a period of extreme economic deprivation. Their country was battered and humiliated, and life was hard. Stefan’s father dreamed of sending his three children to college, and once he’d achieved that, he visibly relaxed. When Stefan got offered a prestigious role as a junior officer at the United Nations headquarters in New York, his father was so proud — and so eager to share the news around — that he started to refer to him as “my American boy”. It was a nickname Stefan privately disliked.A number of high-rise office buildings in midtown allowed a vantage point to the World Trade Center on 9/11. Stefan Schweinfest's partner Luis took this photo after the first plane hit the North Tower, and shared it with him as they made their way home (Stefan Schweinfest)Stefan was good at his job and quickly promoted; he enjoyed his work and believed in the U.N. passionately, unabashedly, so much that it annoyed everybody else. The nineties were, after all, the peak of global optimism. There were semi-regular evacuation drills at the U.N., just like there were for every high-rise building in Manhattan, but they were so predictable as to be laughable: they always fell at 11.45 a.m., so that people could immediately go off to lunch. Stefan and his colleagues used to joke with each other: “What’s the first thing you have to do when there’s an emergency alert at the UN? Grab your lunch package!” That was how Stefan knew, when he arrived at work on Sept. 11, 2001, that something was amiss. The emergency alert had gone out and the evacuation was already underway, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m. Stefan didn’t have a cellphone, and even the people who did couldn’t get through to anyone to work out what was happening; they gathered at the corner of First Avenue for over an hour, hearing rumors passed from person to person and street to street. Eventually, the U.N. staff were allowed back into a side building to collect some personal effects before being dismissed. Stefan went to his office and called Luis from his landline, trying to get more information.“I just watched a plane hit the Twin Towers,” Luis, who worked in a building a few streets away, told him. They agreed to meet up and walk down to their apartment as soon as possible — because there was, all of a sudden, no public transportation at all.Most people rushed uptown after the World Trade Center collapsed. For those who lived downtown, it was a strange and harrowing experience to walk in the other direction (Getty Images)That walk downtown is something Stefan will never forget. Two colleagues of Luis’ who lived in Brooklyn asked if they could come home with Stefan and Luis, since they had no way of getting back to their own homes. As the group made their way towards the East Village, they had the sense of swimming upstream: there was a steady surge of people coming uptown, and hardly anyone going the other way. It was a grim, half-hour trek, and as they continued, the people coming their way got dustier and dirtier, and the looks on their faces were more and more harrowing. He can still remember their expressions beneath the debris sticking to their skin and clothes.“This is so weird,” said Stefan to Luis, after they’d been walking for about 20 minutes. “Do you think someone will stop us?” Almost as soon as he said it, someone did: they hit a police cordon just before their street. Only people who could prove they lived below there were allowed downtown, and Stefan had no ID, no evidence to speak of. It took them ages to eventually dig out a paper bank statement with their address, and that singular bank statement became Stefan’s most precious possession over the next few days while the cordons remained in place.The formerly lively East Village was a ghost town. The bars and restaurants they usually patronized were abandoned; the streets were empty, and whole buildings were deserted. Stefan, Luis and their two friends walked up to their apartment in the eerie silence, walked in and turned on the TV. In the corner were their suitcases, ready to be packed for a vacation to Mexico that was planned for a few days’ time. It was a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but they realized almost immediately that the vacation wouldn’t happen. Friends and family of missing people post signs with photos and descriptions to help locate them outside the armory on Lexington Ave in New York City two days after 9/11 where information is being gathered for all the missing as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center (Getty Images)Over the next few days, Stefan often found himself wandering over to nearby Washington Square Park and looking at the posters that had accrued there. Every day, there were more: blurry, black-and-white printouts of people’s loved ones, with typed or handwritten messages underneath. “MISSING” proclaimed almost every poster, with the details of a lost person below. He would listen, again and again, to the last phone calls made by such people, calls which were being broadcast on a loop from every TV and radio station. He and everyone else in New York held on to the vain hope that some of those callers would be pulled out of the wreckage; that a trapdoor might open in the ground and 2,000 people would walk right out.It took Stefan two full days to properly comprehend that the people in all the pictures at the park, and all the people who had made those calls he listened to on repeat, were dead. In the end, only 18 people came out of the wreckage. Most of them were first responders.‘They will never know the life I knew’Sara Nelson and her colleagues at United Airlines were transferred by bus to a crisis room in the union office when the planes hit the towers. The first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, had already been identified, but officials were still trying to confirm which jet had hit the second tower.Sara put her head in her hands during the bus ride and thought to herself: If I have children, they will never know the life I knew.In the crisis office, updates came every 15 minutes, but it felt like every hour. And suddenly, as she stood crammed in with her coworkers looking up at the TV, Sara had what she can only describe as a vision. A blonde-haired woman with big blue eyes appeared in her mind’s eye, turned to her and said: “Sara, it’s OK. We’re all right.” In the days after 9/11, Sara Nelson and her colleagues volunteered to fly across the country picking up passengers who had been stranded after the mass grounding of aircraft. She wore an American flag pin and a black bow as a sign of grief and remembrance (Sara Nelson)She had her head cocked to her side like she always did and a soft smile on her face, and Sara realized with a jolt that it was her friend, Amy King. Moments later, the vice president of the airline walked in and told them that the second plane was United Airlines Flight 175. Amy and her fiance, Michael Tarrou, had been working onboard, as well as one of their other best friends, Robert Fangman. Sara’s knees buckled and she fell to the ground.Months earlier, Robert had told Sara over drinks that United was the first place he’d felt truly at home as a gay man. He and Sara had a whole routine when they met up: they’d sing Bette Midler’s ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ to each other, only a little off-key, and then jump into each other’s arms before collapsing in laughter. All of a sudden, she was arranging his funeral.The United Airlines memorial for fallen flight attendants was arranged for Sept. 26. Sara was determined to get Bette Midler. She started asking around for contacts.A couple weeks later, under impossibly quiet skies where no flights were departing from Boston’s Logan Airport, Sara helped distribute the programs for the memorial service. People started making noises of disbelief.“Sara,” said one of the family members, turning around. “Bette Midler is on here.”“Yes, I know,” Sara replied, her voice wavering. “She’s here for Robert. She’s here to do ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’.”In the days that followed, the grieving crews were called on to help out with flights to get stranded passengers back from places they’d travelled just before 9/11. They tried to make it as good an experience as they could: they sang patriotic songs and waved little American flags. But having heard of how the terrorists on her friends’ flight had slit the throats of unsuspecting flight attendants in backwards-facing jump seats just before they stormed the cockpit, Sara and her friends didn’t take the standard brace position for takeoff. They put their hands around their throats instead, hoping that if a terrorist was onboard, the knives would hit their fingers instead of their jugulars.The United Airlines plane that hit the South Tower, staffed with Sara Nelson’s friends Amy King, Michael Tarrou and Robert Fangman (AP/Carmen Taylor)Since 9/11, Sara has spent 25 years negotiating with airlines as head of the flight attendants’ union, as the industry shed jobs, pensions and the generous contracts that had once made her get into her car and drive to Chicago on that February day. Airlines slashed staffing, shrank seats and cut back on passenger amenities, while almost half of Sara’s co-workers lost their jobs in the days after the attacks. The heyday was over. The only good industry change that came out of 9/11, Sara believes, was that the private security firms were banned and the TSA was created instead. She finds current talk of privatizing airport security again frightening: she remembers those young, well-meaning screeners who unwittingly let the terrorists through. They had few tools at their disposal, very little training, and worked long hours for incredibly low pay. The ones who worked on September 11th suffered from crippling guilt, and a number of them killed themselves, a fact that haunts Sara to this day.The framed picture of Amy King and Michael Farrou that Sara keeps on her desk at all times (Sara Nelson)In Sara’s office now, she keeps a framed photo of Amy and Michael together. Twenty-five years later, whenever she talks about them, or about Robert — whenever she recalls the Bette Midler routine, and jumping playfully into Robert’s arms — she still cries.A reminder of the USSRAfter watching the towers collapse on a diner TV, Akhmed walked the eight miles back home to Queens with a colleague. They took the Queensboro Bridge over the East River, starting first thing in the morning and arriving back home around sunset.Nobody went into the office the next day; instead, he and his wife sat on the sofa in front of the TV in shocked silence. Later that week, when he did eventually take a trip on the subway into Manhattan, armed police were checking people’s bags. It reminded him of the Soviet Union.When he learned that the terrorists were Muslim, Akhmed had a sinking feeling. He didn’t just fear discrimination from that moment on; he expected it. He braced himself for the looks and the words, the suspicion and discrimination.However, Akhmed was pleasantly surprised by how New Yorkers rallied around him and his community. When he watched Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s speech about uniting rather than dividing, about embracing one’s immigrant and Muslim neighbors from across the world, he felt that he was speaking to him. He never had the urge to leave New York. He still lives in the city, and he’s since had children and raised them here. They’re born-and-bred Americans, with the accents and the passports to match. Not long after 9/11, the dotcom bubble burst, and people began losing their jobs all over New York. That heady optimism of the 90s slowly turned to apathy and resignation. In the past two years especially, Akhmed feels like the atmosphere has become very like how it was in 2001 and 2002. People didn't used to fear the future, he remembers — they used to be excited about it. Now, they look backwards, and it seems like they are scared of what's to come.The Porsche and the bag of ashesMeaghan walked home after school on Sept. 11, 2001 and the family waited to hear from Tom. He couldn’t get in touch until the afternoon, when he was still trying to work out how to get out of Manhattan.Eventually, having heard that the Lincoln Tunnel wouldn’t reopen, Tom was advised by a cop in the late afternoon to try driving north to the George Washington Bridge. The first thing he felt, when he arrived at sunset and realized the bridge was open, was relief. But then, as he turned onto the New Jersey turnpike in the pitch black, his eyes were drawn towards the burning pit of the World Trade Center wreckage, and he froze in horror. He remembers it as the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life.When Meaghan recalls that day, it’s also the fire and the burning that comes back to her: the flames on the TV, and the billowing smoke from the towers that they could see all the way from Westfield, pouring across the sky for days.All public transportation stopped after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, forcing people to either walk miles home or wait hours for a tunnel to open (Getty Images)Stories — both tragic and miraculous — took over their small community. Meghan’s friend Kyler, whose father worked in one of the Twin Towers, was the sole survivor from his 400-person company, because he was taking a meeting a couple miles away. Meaghan’s other friend, Lauren, lost her father in the attacks. Meaghan remembers keeping candlelight vigils on the family’s porch as they waited vainly for good news; she remembers, too, that 9/11 was Lauren’s 10th birthday.Meaghan now works as a schoolteacher at a local elementary school in New Jersey, and every time September 11th rolls around, she’s faced with how to explain the tragedy to a bunch of six- and seven-year-olds. She doesn’t try to hide her emotion when she talks about it. She thinks it’s important to show children that sadness is an appropriate response.A couple weeks after 9/11, Tom went out and bought a Porsche. He laughs now as he calls it a stupid decision, but the Porsche is still in his driveway; he gets close to selling it and then he finds he just can’t bear to part with it. He bought it, at the time, because he had a sudden feeling that life was precious and finite, and he should do things — momentous things, but also fun things — while he still could. The car, however, ended up with its own 9/11 backstory: when Tom went to complete the sale, the salesman told him about how he’d lost a relative in the World Trade Center himself, and how they’d waited and waited for something to bury, and they’d eventually been presented with a small amount of dust in a brown paper bag.Lauren got engaged recently, at the World Trade Center Memorial, so that her father could be with her, in a sense, during one of the most meaningful moments of her life.Tom spent years worrying that his children would be traumatized by what happened that day. But when his brother came to visit New York from Maine recently and wanted to take his kids to Ground Zero, Tom broke down as soon as they arrived. “Are you OK, Tommy?” his brother asked him, surprised by his reaction. “No,” replied Tom, simply. “I’m not.”Meaghan knows she felt sad for everyone involved in the attacks, but she also recalls how the following month, she got her first boyfriend, and that eclipsed pretty much everything else in her life. Not long after, she resumed taking yearly flights to Ireland to compete with her dancing troupe. Look, this is 9/11 thing is terrible, she remembers thinking, but also — does he still like me? Because he said he liked me and now he’s not talking to me in the hallway.Simply put, life went on.A strange kind of traumaStefan’s mother spent a lot of time on the phone with him from Germany in the days following 9/11: her anxiety was obvious. But Stefan had no plans to move home. In fact, for the first time, he started calling himself a New Yorker.Pragmatic and no-nonsense, Stefan doesn’t think he experienced that much trauma from being in the city on September 11th — but he does recall that for a couple years after, every time he heard an airplane fly over him in the city, he’d look up and take note of its altitude, just to make sure it wasn’t heading for a building.A couple of years ago, Stefan and Luis retired to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, planning to spend their golden years in the sunshine. But in February of this year, their peace was disturbed by a coordinated attack by the local drug cartels, who burned buildings and vehicles throughout the area. They stood on their balcony, watching army helicopters fly overhead and plumes of smoke rise from the destruction, and said to each other simultaneously: “9/11.” Stefan Schweinfest (right) and his partner Luis, pictured in 2026. After spending the rest of their careers in New York, the couple have retired to Puerto Vallerta in Mexico (Stefan Schweinfest)By the time Stefan retired from the U.N., he was the head of his division. He knows firsthand how difficult negotiations can be between countries across the world who are disinclined to work together. And he knows that, for the younger generations of people entering the field, things are harder than ever.Nevertheless, Stefan still believes in a positive future. He knows that the optimism of the 90s was a naive optimism: there were still terrible things happening across the world; we were simply less aware of them. When people come to him for advice or mentorship these days, he tells them, “Hang in there.” The major global problems we have today simply cannot be solved by someone alone in their corner with a rocket ship or an AI. Humanity will come back to collective action. Believe in people.After all (he likes to say, as his father said to him), you have to remember that you can’t pay anything backwards. You can only pay it forwards.*Akhmed Ismailov is a pseudonym