They won't lose their shirts, just the beer money they spent on a meme. Plenty of them really don't care.
I remember reading about people mortgaging their house to get into bitcoin, etc.
I don't know how the coming days will play out, but I'm quite confident when this is all over we'll be treated to stories in the NYT about how someone lost their life savings, alongside calls for regulation.
There was a tiny minority that did stupid things like buy $20k of options on credit cards but there's a minority of stupid people like that everywhere.
It's a bit disingenuous for people to make it seem like there's thousands of people putting their life savings and retirements into stocks - and even so, I would guess that many of the people who do claim to use "life savings" actually mean "the 10k I had in my bank savings account" because they're only 23.