I hear ya 100%. I think a lot of people do this. It's why I've always chickened out of investing for a long time until now. With age comes the wisdom of not giving a fuck so I'm gonna start investing hard so hopefully I can have "Fuck You money" and retire early. Being consciously aware is the first step to actually making a change in every area of your life.

I recently stumbled upon JLCollins who did a Google talk about investing. His blog Stock Series has a post titled "The Market Always Goes Up". That simple statement makes a lot of sense. He talks about how the market will always continue to go on an upwards trajectory despite periods of ups and downs. If it ever went to zero then we are all fucked anyway haha!

What really etched into my mind was a graph of the Dow Jones from 1900 - 2012 and how it has always recovered from dips and kept on growing upwards. Only the Great Depression has a really notable scary dip which apparently took something like 25 years to recover.... but it did indeed recover and I'm sure we learnt a lot from it.

"Time in the market beats timing the market" is such a powerful quote once you realise it is correct.