It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant. — Douglas Adams

It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant.

Author: Douglas Adams

Insight: Douglas Adams was pointing at something we don't always notice: how fast the world actually changes. We get so used to things as they are that we forget they were once impossible. A generation ago, commercial pilots were almost exclusively men, and flight attendants were almost exclusively women. The idea of their professional roles overlapping in certain ways was genuinely unthinkable. Now it's just... life. But the real insight isn't really about airlines. It's about how many things we assume are permanent fixtures—gender roles, career paths, who does what job—are actually just temporary arrangements. We treat them like laws of nature when they're more like habits that can shift surprisingly fast. Adams uses the absurdist humor he's known for to snap us awake: if something as seemingly fixed as professional hierarchies can change, what else have we gotten wrong about what's "natural" or "impossible"? The quote lands differently now too. It reminds us that when we say something can't happen or shouldn't happen, we're often just describing what hasn't happened yet. Progress isn't always dramatic speeches or big policy fights. Sometimes it's just people moving into roles we never imagined them in, and the world quietly becoming less rigid than we thought it had to be.

Source: Mostly Harmless, p. 201, 1992