The stock market has had a terrible year. These Americans are not bothered.

According to a Gallup survey this spring, 41% of Americans say they have no money invested in the stock market. Many of them cannot afford to invest: 75% of those with household incomes of less than $40,000 a year say they have no investment, according to Gallup. For others, it’s a choice: 11% of Americans with a household income of at least $100,000 a year have nothing in stocks.

Arlene LaHera, 65, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., said she couldn’t think of a time when market ups or downs affected her life. She hopes, for the sake of others, that the market will recover soon, but she has no investments, and she said, “on a personal level, it just seems a bit far off.”

Ms LaHera, who makes a living selling a medical device she invented, said she had no money to invest. But even if she did, she could not withstand the violent fluctuations of the market. A friend’s experience with day-trading only validates his feelings.

“He’s still a wreck on his day-to-day trades,” she said. “I would rather have some sort of normal level of happiness all the time than severe ups and downs.”

Stock and bond markets have historically provided a reliable route to building wealth, but some non-investors don’t recognize its benefits or believe there are better alternatives. Research suggests that this year’s bear market should not change their minds. A study found that between 1960 and 2007, the more recently a person had experienced a year of low stock market returns, the less likely they were to have made investments.

Many investors who won’t need to sell their holdings for decades and who can reasonably expect them to grow over the long term, have nevertheless been rattled by the recent series of losses.

“I’ve had a lot more conversations with clients expressing concerns and asking questions that suggest they’re considering walking away from part of the markets,” said Joshua Escalante Troesh, financial adviser at Rancho Cucamonga, in California. He advised everyone to stick to their long-term strategy and not sell.

Some who can afford to invest prefer to channel their money elsewhere. Michael Mitchell, a 38-year-old high school teacher in Statesville, North Carolina, could afford to invest money in the market, but instead piled up his savings to pay off the remaining $93,000 of his mortgage. He hopes to do so in a few months, wiping out the next 18 years of mortgage payments in one fell swoop.

When stocks soared in the years following the financial crisis, Mr Mitchell became frustrated that his salary was holding steady as the economy improved, and he felt that none of the gains had come to him. He came to feel indifferent as to whether the market was going up or, nowadays, down. “If I had $1 million in the stock market, I’d probably be a lot more worried,” he said of recent market swings. He doesn’t have a 401(k), but as a teacher in a public school, he will get a pension.

Mr Mitchell said he prioritizes financial stability and living within his means, and is choosing not to invest, for now. He considers himself thrifty and drives a 2001 Honda Accord. Whatever happens in the stock market, he says, “I always save my surplus, I spend time with people I care about, I do what I love in life, and I don’t live a life of extravagance or trying to keep up with my wealthier neighbors.

The stock market maybe not the economybut its fluctuations touch the lives of Americans whether invested or not.

“As the stock market goes down, households that have stocks, their wealth goes down, and then they spend less,” said Alp Simsek, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management. Companies then face lower demand and, in turn, hire less or reduce working hours. Mr. Simsek, along with other researchers, believes that through this chain events, a 20% drop in the market can result in a 1.7% or more drop in workers’ overall income two years later — “not a huge effect, but it’s huge,” he said. .

On a shorter time scale, a British study found that the more stocks have fallen over six-month or one-year periods, the lower the levels of mental well-being subsequently reported by investors and non-investors. Another study, conducted by two finance professors in California, found that the days when stocks fell, hospital admissions for psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression rose slightly across the state. To cite just one extreme example, on the day of the 1987 crash known as “Black Monday”, hospital admissions, psychological and otherwise, soared as much as 5% above average.

Paying attention to the stock market can be interesting for non-investors, says Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic research group at the Brookings Institution. While many daily market moves have little broader meaning, she said, how the market reacts in the moment to economic news, such as a strong employment relationship Where new inflation datacan be indicative of what financial analysts think about the future of the economy.

Many non-investors fail to make connections between the market and their daily lives. “It certainly doesn’t seem to affect anything I do,” said Alberto Meza, a 61-year-old construction worker in Hawthorne, Calif., who hasn’t invested in stocks himself. (Mr Meza has a retirement plan through his union, but he said it hadn’t occurred to him that meant the union might have money invested on his behalf. )

Mr. Meza assumes that he could have afforded to invest small amounts himself over the years, but he never gave it serious thought. “I was born poor, I grew up poor,” he said. “It was nothing that anyone I know, like my parents – they never talked about the scholarship.”

For Mr Meza, seeing the news of the latest market turmoil doesn’t come with the sting an investor might feel – it’s like hearing that a football team he doesn’t care about, like the Cincinnati Bengals, lost a game.

“That’s bad news for investors, I guess,” he said. “It’s not bad news for me.”

Write to Joe Pinsker at [email protected]