There is a difference between the way Doctors, Lawyers, or Businessmen get to the good stuff and the way pilots get to a decent job.
The difference is most of the Doctors, Lawyers, or Businessmen end up making a decent wage and make enough to retire on by the time they are 45 or 50, plus more importantly their professions require all that preparation and previous experience.
On the other hand many pilots today may start spending a fortune, then work for free or almost free for a while, and afterwards spend the rest of their life making enough to live day by day, and by the time they retire they barely make a living. And let's be real, with the right training you can make a pretty good pilots in a few months, the way the military does. (think 23 year old 400 hr. pilots landing 40 millon fighters in a carrier at night)
By reading some of the previous posts I can now see how helicopter pilots are on a much lower scale than "shrimp boat captains" in some countries where you have a bunch of people with a ton of cash and nothing else to do with their lives but go and be a pilot and then work for free.