"Another thing I recall is the bears at Silicon Investor foaming at the mouth from 96-2001. They were screaming about valuations and shorting the high fliers. Few of them had any money left when they were proven right."
Shorting is risky and not a good thing to do with retirement money.
Even with the ups and downs, if you follow your strategy of being diversified and and steadily adding to your pile, you will come out in good shape over long periods of time. $2000 a year invested over the last 40 years in a S&P 500 index fund would currently be worth about 2 1/2 million dollars. That is a reasonable investment amount for most people and a decent amount of retirement money. Someone who does that will not be eating Alpo at 65.