Matt Inglot's on Not Having a "Real Job"

[Update: the post can now be accessed here]

Matt Inglot shares a short anecdote about people's attitudes towards an unconventional career path:

While I was busy learning about business in an unconventional way and doing so from the comfort of home, my friends were also in the process of getting their first jobs. I was then introduced to a mentality that I didn’t really understand, and still don’t. The moment they joined the workforce flipping burgers and stocking shelves they became really helpful in telling me that I should also get a job. When I insisted that I did have a job and enjoyed it very much the response was always “that’s not a real job Matt”.

...

The fear of somebody doing something different, something with an unsure ending, is so strongly built into society that virtually all the high schoolers I knew instinctively tried to tell me that I was on the wrong path. In reality they were scared, and trying to re-assure each other as a flock that their normal path was indeed the correct one.

I must admit that the way people prefix things with "real"--like "real job", "real music", "real world" etc etc--irritates me. It's usually a lazy, hollow way of criticising the things that are supposedly not "real" instances of the thing.