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?
In the trade industry here in New Zealand, we have a specific term for such a person, we generally refer to them as ‘cunt’
Why do we need to nounify it? It doesn’t need to be a special concept. Find the words for what they’re doing and describe it.
It sounds like they’re invalidating your experiences and struggling to recognize perspectives outside their own.
I guess if you really want to nominalize it, call it “hand-waving”. oh that doesn’t count. just anything but “anecdotal evidence” because I beg you please do not try to communicate your own subjective emotional experiences by using haughty, dry logic 101 vocabulary.
why? because it’s the fastest way to get lost in the bullshit of “is it or isnt it?!” and completely lose the conversation from focusing on how this person is treating you.
Using anecdotal evidence is not inherently abusive… this shitty behavior is
it’s gaslighting. yep Definitely gaslighting. I totally know what gaslighting means and everything I don’t like is gaslighting
or maybe it’s woke. tell them to stop gaslighting you with their woke comments
/bj
thre is a phrase. its called typical internet discourse ;p
Insecure, contrarian, infantile.
Reminds me of the “No True Scotsman” logical fallacy based on the example you provided. Wiki article
The word my family uses for that is “mom”.
Depending on the angle (a lot going on there) you could go with “denial”. As in, you’re lying, because if you’re bot, then my life sucked, and that’s unacceptable, so you’re lying.
“Actshuuuaallyy…”
Invalidation
Yes- they are invalidating or minimizing your experience.
As someone with personal experience with interacting with people, I have to disagree. Nobody has EVER done anything like this, and it does not require a word.
I would call this qualia chauvinism, when people need to feel their subjective experience is universal.
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.
