How did you react in March / April 2020 ?
Everybody's experience is going to be different, but for me, the COVID crash came so fast, I didn't have time to react. I had hit a new financial high on February 19, but by March 23 was down about 35%. For the year, I was down about 30.5%.
The recovery was quick, though. I finished out March "only" down about 21.5% for the year. By April, I was down about 13.3%. By August I was up about 3% for the year, and I finished 2020 with a return of around 13.2%.
I'll admit, when I first took the hit, my initial thought was "oh crap, this might get bad!" But I didn't make any rash decisions. I did a little rebalancing here and there if some of my asset allocations got too far out of whack, but I didn't do any major selloffs or anything.
I can't speak for Major Tom, but I'd imagine if he's been retired for 12 years and doing fine, he doesn't have to worry about a bad string of sequence of returns. That usually only factors in, if you retire during a peak year, and then the economy crashes and stays down for awhile.
Still, I imagine that, no matter how far along you might be, when there's some kind of bad economic event, it's hard to shake the feeling that, "This time it WILL be different!"