That is bullshit. 

HODL does not mean "hold on for dear life"

That was some no coiner gambler who came up with that characterization in order to wrongly imply some level of gambling and/or panic that a HODLer needs to have.

There are ways to set up your investment strategies so that you do not need to fear prices, and if prices go down you get more sats for the amount of dollars that you are using to buy them.. so whether you buy on the dip or you DCA, you should well consider that if you start to run out of money and the BTC price is going down, then you may well need to HODL in those circumstances. .at least until you get more money, then at that point you might choose to buy some more bitcoin with your new cashflow.

There also might be some other times that you choose to HODL on the way up, and surely those are personal choices in regards to how much BTC that you might have had already accumulated, and there could be some stress in terms of trying to decide what to do, even if the BTC price might be going up. 

Panic can come at various points in time if you have not set forth some kind of reasonable plan and attempted to mostly follow the plan even when there might come about some circumstances that had been previously unexpected, but if you have an overall solid plan, you should be able to figure out some kind of a reasonable approach to what to do in regards to your BTC, even if you had not completely planned for the situation that is being experienced that might end up going beyond expectations.  HODL.. is one of the potential solutions, but it is not the ONLY solution, so when and how HODL might be applied may well differ from person to person, but hopefully we are not getting ourself into emotional states that are too far gone that we start to believe that HODL itself is a kind of an emotional state rather than a decision that is within one of our plan options.

Long term HODL should also not be too emotional, even though maybe there should be some decently good feelings if you may have built up your BTC position to such a status that it is giving you more options, even if you might not be choosing to exercise your options, but sometimes when we have a decently sized BTC stash, we might well feel free to either accumulate large amounts of cash or even to invest into some other kinds of assets with our incoming cashflow because we have largely already established our BTC position. .and we choose to mostly and perhaps not exclusively HODL it.

By the way, the timeline of NOT expecting quick returns may well likely help to establish that the first few years in bitcoin might be the most difficult while building up a bitcoin stash, and surely there are going to be some members who take a couple of cycles to build up their BTC stash. .and there is nothing wrong with that - especially considering that sometimes we may well have difficulties to either increase our income or to decrease our expenses in order that we might be able to buy more bitcoin, so we just have to figure out a level of purchase that is suitable for us.. and that there may be a lot of holding time that accompanies the building of a BTC stack.. including establishing ways to secure our stash through our own self-custody, even if we might not start out with self-custody until we learn some of the available options and figure out which options might be suitable to our own situations.