All loss porn aside, some people may never invest in stocks again.

$AMC Entertainment (AMC.US)$ $GameStop (GME.US)$ In the late 20s, I was making a great salary, aggressively saving, living frugally, but for investing was risk averse, by nature. I did not want to lose money I had earned and saved. I still don't.

Full blown dot com mania rolled around when the globe.com went public in late 2010. I played around with an ETrade account during the .com bubble, making harmless $5k trades, no options, took profits way too early, but followed the market action very closely. I dabbled lightly and did some IPO trades, some premature shorting, and mostly used it as a positive learning experience. No harm, no foul. I was mostly a coward, happy to have my money safe on the sidelines, CDs and bonds, but the dot com bubble was spectacular on the upside and the downside.

However, the experience left me very distrustful of the entire game. Missed out on tons of tech gains for the next 20 years.

I get the feeling this recent bear market will scar some of the victims for life. My advice is to learn from your mistakes (YOLO options trades, bag-holding meme stocks, invest in diversified ETFs, etc) ....Whatever you see as the lesson for you and move forward with your financial lives. Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater and stuff cash in your mattress for the rest of your life. Because there are a bunch of people reading this who are at risk of doing exactly that, which to be fair, isn't the worst thing in the world.