There's a thread over in r/relationship_advice about a girlfriend dealing with her boyfriend who wanted to become a professional streamer, and it's reminded me of a situation I'm in the middle of with a friend.

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I have this friend, we'll call him Joe, and he's decided he wants to make a career out of streaming video games on Twitch. He largely chose this after seeing my YouTube channel grow a fair amount within in the past year. But the thing is, I'm a content creator as a hobby - it gets me a little extra money at the moment and if I can make it a career eventually then cool, but I'm not counting on it and still work a day job. Joe dropped out of high school about a year ago and won't get a job because he's insistent on being a streamer. He tried to get a channel started on YouTube but gave up on that since he wasn't getting any views, so he's moved over to Twitch and has been streaming daily for the past couple months. However, he hasn't had much luck in gaining an audience. He's not the worst streamer ever, he just doesn't have a very good personality for it - he's rather shy and he'll sometimes sit there on the game menu if there's no one to talk to him (which is often) like "um... so uh... I don't know what to do... hmm... well..." It's awkward as fuck to watch, then usually he'll message me to join because he's terrible at interacting with the audience or coming up with something to talk about on his own.

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He also lives with his parents and they often nag at him to get a job, they're worried he's not doing anything with his life, etc., and I'm starting to agree with them. I've tried being supportive but after his streams he'll sometimes message me being all sad going on about how no one's watching him and he doesn't know what to do because he wants to be a streamer so bad, it's his life's dream even though he just decided on this a couple months ago. It's become rather frustrating, like he expects to become an instant success overnight. Even for me, it took 5 years to get to where I am now and only recently starting growing a decent amount in the past year. I've tried telling him that maybe he needs something to fall back on, perhaps not stream every single day and instead work part-time a few days a week, but he completely refuses, says he doesn't want to neglect his channel or whatever, and if he wants to be successful he needs to put all his time and effort into it.

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It's getting to the point where I want to have a firm discussion with Joe about the realities of his "dream" and tell him his parents are right, and he shouldn't waste his life like this chasing something that's probably never going to happen. But at the same time I feel like crushing his dreams would also be an asshole move being his friend, especially since he looks up to me a lot and he's stated before that he aspires to be more like me. Would I be the asshole to put my foot down in this situation?