People Share What Life Was Like Before 9/11

Buzz Feed

17-05-2025

For those of us who lived through 9/11, it may be hard to believe that next year will mark the 25th anniversary of that tragic day. It also means that there is now a whole generation of young adults who have never known a pre-9/11 world because they were either way too young at the time or weren't even born.
Recently, Reddit user Independent_East_135 wanted to know about the pre-9/11 world when they asked this to the AskOldPeople subreddit: "I was born in 2003, so I wasn't around to experience 9/11 or its after effects. But, I'm always hearing people older than me talk about how 9/11 'changed everything' and how things in general were different. Even the vibe of life apparently. Is this true? What was life like before 9/11?"
The thread got hundreds of responses, and while a lot of people leaned into how air travel changed, some brought up just the little things about how simple life seemed. Below are the top and most often repeated comments:
"Well we didn't have to get to the airport super early to allow extra time for TSA clearance."
"You didn't need a boarding pass to go to the gate. You could go to the gate to meet people."
"A lot less stressful and hurried. Things seemed a lot easier then, cheaper, less crowded, and people were a lot less angry. People smiled more and trusted each other more."
"There was not as much of a 24-hour news cycle and the world felt less fearful prior to 9/11. The little ticker at the bottom of the screen on the news wasn't a thing til 9/11."
"There was a bar at John Wayne Airport that was apparently the place to go. People showed up and had drinks there without even having a flight. My older siblings went and told me about it as a place to look forward to when I turned 21. I turned 21 in 2003."
"Well, the transition from analog to digital was the biggest thing to happen in my lifetime, and it started happening right around the year 2000. Before that, TVs, movies, etc. — with the exception of CDs for music — were analog and a lot on physical tape. Basically, the TV and computer were a physical place, and thus, media was consumed at a specific physical place; thus, if you left that place, you didn't take your tech with you. Sure, there were portable solutions like CD players and handheld consoles, but they were more or less in their infancy."
"One major difference that is tough to even remember, let alone to describe to someone who didn't live through it, was how parochial information was back then. Take any obscure factoid, for example: What happened downtown this afternoon? Where was a certain rock star born? Who was the goaltender on the 1980 Swedish Olympic team? Today, you can call it up in a matter of seconds; back then, you had to either have the knowledge, have someone who did, or have access to people or resources (news, books, libraries, microfilms, etc.) that did. Otherwise, you shrugged and went on with your day. There was no falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes."
"I live in NYC. Before 9/11, there was no security before walking into most buildings. I remember walking into the back door of City Hall and not even being asked who I was there to see. Now, many buildings don't allow you to enter unless your name has been provided in advance to the front desk and matches a photo ID. You are then issued a temporary photo ID that opens a turnstile at the elevator."
"In 2000, coming back from my first business trip from Panama back to Miami, I was able to bring a machete in my carry-on and was waved through. Yes, it was a different world."
"I remember as a kid getting to see the cockpit of planes during flights. You asked the stewardess, and she asked the captain, and most of the time, you were allowed in! I even have a pic of me as a kid midflight in the co-pilot seat with his headset on!!!"
"The world was less desensitised to violence and killing than it is now. It wasn't perfect, and there was plenty of conflict, but when it happened, people were shocked by what they saw."
"The Twin Towers going down showed that the US was vulnerable to attack from outsiders/terrorists. Until then, any terrorist attacks were either foiled, failed, or were from domestic terrorists (Timothy McVeigh). We had been living in a world where we thought no one from outside could get to us."
"I think it was more the combination of the lack of government surveillance/caution and the fact that the Cold War ended that the '90s felt so safe for everybody. I finished college and was traveling overseas in the '90s, and there wasn't really anywhere you couldn't go; I was very comfortable visiting Muslim countries as an American."
"Security for all travel was more lax, not just air travel. Literally right before 9/11, my husband and I accidentally got on a train a day early, and nobody noticed b/c the Amtrak people barely glanced at the ticket."
"As a teenager, I could park by the airport fence, lie on my hood, and watch planes take off and land for hours."
"The period from about 1994 to 2001 was the best. We had the benefits of the internet but not the complexity. Tech boom, stock options, optimism. Ease of life. If I wanted to get away for the weekend, I'd find a last-minute deal for a flight, a hotel, and a car. Like, $200 would cover a weekend in Miami, leaving from Boston. That included a nice hotel, like a Hyatt Regency."
"Before 9/11, no one played 'God Bless America' at baseball games. I don't know if any other teams still do it, but in my city, they still play it before the national anthem. It struck me as weird when they started it and even weirder that they haven't stopped."
And lastly, "Politics was already changing, but division and partisanship accelerated exponentially afterwards. Surveillance technology was also brought to the masses, and security awareness and paranoia also proliferated. It wasn't that 9/11 changed us, but it was a catalytic inflection point."
You can read the original thread on Reddit.