I worked with a fellow once who said something to this effect right after the market went down during the pandemic. He said something like “I lost $50k yesterday”, and I asked him “oh really? Did you sell a bunch of stuff? If you still have it it’ll go back up eventually”.
He said “No I didn’t sell anything, but in 5 years everything is going to be lower than if the market hadn’t gone down”.
That take is also wrong. As you can see in this graph, things bounced back, and in general continued on the same trajectory.
Just like there was a sharp decline, there was also a sharp increase. Without the decrease, the increase wouldn’t have happened, so the fellow I was working with was wrong, because his take would have meant the sharp increase would have happened even without the sharp decrease.