Please don't worry. There will be no shortage of people who believe next time will be different. That's the beauty of the cycle. As you near the end, some subset of the people who swore they'd never be left holding the bag again become bag holders.
Yes people seem to have short memories these days. After 1929 it took a long time for people to think about investing in the stock market again.
What is probably more of an issue is that wide-scale bag holding will trigger new regulations that will make it much hard for startups to raise money in the future. Even if people want to invest it might prove impossible to raise money in practice.
This actually happened in biotech in the last 15 years. Everyone bought into the promise of genomics and it all blew up (not genomics itself, but the idea you can make oodles of cash from it).
The biotech IPO window was almost closed from ~2000 to 2012-2013. Look at it now! Companies with nothing more than a promise raising $150M+ at IPO. I haven't kept track, but it wouldn't surprise me if close to 100 biotechs have IPOed in the last 2-3 years.
Don’t I know this. As someone who runs a genomics company that started in 1999 I have been through this whole experience. When I started people were literally giving me money for free and by 2001 you could not raise a cent even if you were profitable.
And the Nasdaq biotech index (NBI) has skyrocketed, from 1,000 four years ago, to a recent peak of 4,000 before the plunge (after having barely moved for a decade previously).
The cycle of getting burned than getting burned again is shorter than you'd think. Just look at the housing market in some US regions. "Come on! Housing will never go down here!"
Apparently most people's memories don't even go back as far as 2008.
