You could have been a doctor! You should have been a doctor! Some of us are used to our family members telling us this as a joke at Thanksgiving and other family reunions.

However, some of our loved ones are more insistent than others and use every occasion to remind us that we didn’t go to med school and are, instead, pursuing our dreams of, say, becoming a DJ.

One of the best hypothetical ways to make your kid guilty that they’re not a doctor? Criticizing them on an airplane for not pursuing healthcare as a vocation when a flight attendant asks if there’s a doctor on board. And that’s how the ‘Is there a doctor on this flight?’ meme was born, all thanks to Twitter user Laura Gao who seems to have started the trend.

We’ve collected some of the best ‘Is there a doctor on this flight?’ memes and we hope you enjoy them. Upvote your faves and let us know which ones you enjoyed and why. And don’t worry, dear Pandas, not everyone’s meant to be a doctor. You can still make your dreams of becoming a DJ come true. I believe in you!

Image credits: heylauragao

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Image credits: jacksonhvisuals

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Image credits: AlwaysAButt

The meme quickly evolved with people replacing ‘doctor’ with the profession their parents value the most. Even journalists are sharing the meme, making quips about their dads telling them to “Go and see if finding a second source helps.”

Some families are more predisposed to pressure their kids into following a certain profession than others. For example, Asian communities often value being a doctor or a lawyer very much and some do put a lot of pressure on their children to succeed in those areas.

“The drive for success and status within Asian American culture can be quite intense. For many, being a medical doctor is considered to be the pinnacle of achievement and virtually nothing can make an Asian parent more proud than having his/her son or daughter reach the status of joining the medical profession. At the same time, many young Asian Americans resent the pressure, direct and indirect, that their parents place on them to become a doctor,” explains Asian Nation.

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Image credits: annaeveryday

#4

Image credits: heylauragao

Such pressure can do more harm than good. Ranjana Srivastava, writing for The Guardian, agrees with this conclusion. “A career in medicine is stressful enough for the doctors who see it as a calling. For those who do it because their parents forced them, it could be critical,” she writes.

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Image credits: thedad

“Students pondering a career in medicine, I have always welcomed. Parents who do it on behalf of their child, I am increasingly wary of. The students are largely altruistic; the parents aspire to status, money and job security. I don’t blame them but what they don’t realize is that in the hyper-competitive world of medicine, even those with the marks and motivation battle to get in, so there is even less room for those with the marks but scant motivation,” Srivastava explains that kids have to see medicine as a calling and pursue it of their own will.