It is said it matters more in which currency is your spending than your income. To truly understand that you'd have to live in a country with hyperinflation, while prices are more or less pegged to a strong currency. Venezuelans probably understand that very well. Argentinians most likely are in the same situation. People from Turkey felt the effects of hyperinflation on their national currency too. Nigerians saw their local currency fall hard as well.
Whether they understood the exact economical mechanisms that created what they live(d) through it doesn't really matter. They can see the effects and understand that if they earn their income in their national currency, it will soon be worth less because prices rise even from one day to the next, in some extreme cases from one hour to the next.
I lived through such a period as a child, but I understood it much later and made the connection with my memories.
But that saying doesn't refer necessarily to rising prices as a wider phenomenon.
Let's say you earn your income in Yen and spend it in USD. And let's say the Yen devalues compared to USD from the time you receive your income to the time you spend it (can be a short term thing). That will effectively reduce the spending power of your income because you would be able to buy fewer products due to the unfavorable exchange rate.
This is one reason why stablecoins are absolutely necessary in the crypto verse (at this time - we will see what the future brings). Generally, in the real economy are accepted currencies widely used as units of account and mediums of exchange, regardless if they are themselves volatile one compared to another.
So, if you'd have 0.1 bitcoins in the bear market, would you use it to buy something in the real world? Probably not, unless it's the last option. How about in the bull market? Some would say yes. But it really depend. Is the price set using fiat currency as a unit of account or Bitcoin as a unit of account? In the former case, maybe it's an option. In the latter, where the price in Bitcoin doesn't vary significantly between bear and bull market, would you still do it? Others will say no, regardless of circumstances, thinking of Bitcoin as a store of value, and not as a currency.
I had significant fiat expenses over the last few months (it will be over 10k Euro when it's all done, for now). I refused to use any crypto holdings to fund my expenses, knowing it wasn't the right time.
But the recent experience (which isn't over yet), made me think more about collateralization in the crypto verse (thus two recent posts on the theme), holding significant savings of stablecoins even through the bull market for rather unplanned situations, and how crypto could use better options overall.
For example, for the collateralized lending products, loans generally make sense taken during the bear market and repaid after gains of the bull market roll in.
But what if there were different types of products, and some of them would make sense the other way around. If it's an unplanned expense, you can't really wait for the bear market because that would be a better time to take the loan. What if there was a product or a combination of products where it was better to take to loan during the bull market and repay it during the bear market, all while having the same risk factor as the opposite?
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