You don't, there's also elixir - http://elixir-lang.org. Elixir runs on the erlang VM but has a "nicer" syntax. (Nicer for some people, I don't mind it, but I don't think the syntax of erlang is a problem.)

Elixir is working its way to being a full erlang replacement, and apparently isn't yet one, but it replaces everything I need. It also has some really nice (And critical for my project) features that erlang doesn't have, due to the way its implemented. Namely, convenient code swapping in a way that would be hard for me to do in erlang.

The language is evolving pretty rapidly and has great guys behind it (Yurii Rashkovskii and José Valim)

You could build a platform that is concurrent the way erlang is... but the reason people use erlang is that nobody else really has.

There's a lot of stuff out there that's sorta pretending to solve these problems, but none that I've heard of have actually done the hard work.

It's not impossible, it just takes more commitment than most people are willing to invest.