For years, markets have rewarded people who simply kept buying. Every dip seemed temporary. Every selloff felt like a sale. But one seasoned investor recently issued a reminder: what many newer investors have experienced isn’t the same as a true, prolonged market crash.

“It’s not just red numbers on a screen,” the investor wrote on Reddit’s r/Bogleheads forum, reflecting on 2008. “It’s layoffs, hiring freezes, underwater homes, and years of slow recovery.”

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The phrase “stay the course” is easy to repeat in a bull market. It becomes much harder when your portfolio drops 40% or 50% and the recovery takes years, not months.

The last time that kind of sustained pain hit was during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and, before that, the 2000 dot-com collapse. Stocks didn’t just dip. They kept falling. Then they stayed down. In some cases, it took nearly a decade for certain indexes to recover to previous highs.

One investor who lived through 2008 described watching their portfolio fall by half. “It’s pretty gut-wrenching watching your portfolio and your whole plan drop 50% in 5 months,” they said. “I did stay invested and stayed the course, but it took a sh*tload of courage to do it.”

Others admitted they couldn’t handle it. One person said they moved to cash during a downturn and later realized they had locked in a six-figure loss. Another shared that they stopped opening brokerage statements entirely because the paper losses were too painful to see.

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But the real stress, many said, wasn’t the portfolio balance. It was everything happening at once.

“Your stocks drop, you lose your job, and your home is underwater so you can’t move,” one commenter wrote. “I saw this happen to multiple friends in the Great Recession. It was extremely stressful. Some of them never recovered back to the same financial state.”

That correlation, falling markets, rising unemployment and tightening credit, is what separates a quick dip from a true crisis. During 2008 and the years that followed, people saw neighbors lose homes, credit cards get cut off, and entire industries freeze hiring.