Can someone explain to me how the stock market is basically a separate entity from the economy?

So I’m 23 years old, and I put left over scholarship money into a S&P tracking RothIRA at 20, fully planning on letting it sit and add to it

I decided to pull my money out (it’s still in Fidelity just not invested) when the Iran war started. That event, plus the AI bubble and over evaluation with SpaceX, and the economy doing terribly rn (at least anecdotally), it seemed we were in for a crash. Now I know “time in the market beats timing the marking”, but this felt like a very easy chance to avoid catastrophe

And yet it hasn’t happened yet. It’s been months at this point. Clearly the rules of the stock market are different than that of the economy at large. So I’m curious if someone could explain how they’re connected, and how I can conceptualize economy news from market news

Edit: Did not expect this post to gain so much traction. Thank you to those who left thoughtful and intentional responses and engaged in the discourse here. More judgemental comments than I would have liked by that’s Reddit for you

Edit 2: I asked for an answer to the title question. I don’t need a lecture about pulling out of my index fund for a few months. I acknowledged it. Get off your superiority complex and keep it pushing