I’m familiar with one-uppers - like if you say I only got 6 hours of sleep last night and someone has to chime in and say “that’s nothing! I got only 3 hours”
So something similar to that but not one-upping.
Like if you said "I worked in a warehouse once, my boss was cool, and the work wasn’t bad. " And then someone replied with, “I don’t know what gravy-ass, non-real-job place you worked at, but every warehouse I have worked in sucks!”
So, the person is kind of one-upping but that the same time trying to claim that your lived experience isn’t true and their experience is the way things actually are.
Is there a word for that?
This person is one-upping you only to prove to themselves that their experience was justified, by making yours unjustified. I get defensive when someone brings up a workplace I struggled with. I think the perspective of the person that put your experience down as “not-real” is attacking your experience out of defense. It’s rude and ugly, but the alternative is that “warehouses” are Not bad to work in, or that you are better at working a warehouse than they were. It might be emotionally painful to consider those alternatives, and it’s much easier to make younger workers feel overly entitled.