Okay, I just realized that I posted my comment in !memes@lemmy.world. I screwed up and made a false assumption the person I replied to was posting in !wholesome@reddthat.com. I'm on PieFed, where crossposts are shown together, along with comments from each community it was posted in. Must have missed the giant header preceding the comments from !memes@lemmy.world explicitly telling me I am looking at lemmy.world comments. Sorry!

I do want to reply, too, though, because I do feel defensive about the more-roughly/unflatteringly-worded interpretation of my comment or its implications.

If it makes you feel better, I haven't made anything up myself personally, though I admit I have posted things without fact-checking unless it seemed fishy. I do think a lot of wholesome posts tend to be personal anecdotes, and people tend to project their own experiences on the rest of the world, which can lead to a lot of "this could never happen. It is unthinkable in my experience with the world, or this particular corner of the world" (in this case sales) even if the anecdote is real. But I have thankfully never worked sales or customer service, so I don't know for sure. I do have a tendency towards believing people instead of calling "fake, r/thathappened". I do have huge concern over misinformation when it comes to facts. But I am not quite as concerned with falsely believing wholesome story anecdotes, though I know they too can lead to harms (though probably not as dangerous in this case. Maybe if this story is as fake as a commenter claimed, someone thinks sales can be chiller and more compassionate than it truly is, and apply or recommend someone else apply and then they burn out and waste time applying for and working a job they hate, and now they have to do the hiring process again? Or that people are friendlier to the lonely elderly than they truly are? This is far less damaging than an anecdote that casts aspersions on other groups. I can imagine one that talks about helping someone out, but also falsely attributes the reason they needed help to misdeeds of a marginalized group).

I think I am not so mad as you because I really don't believe anyone's gaslighting here, and even if they are I do not think the harms with false wholesome anecdotes are quite as bad as the harms when saying untruths during discussion of $hotButtonTopic.

I also frankly grow tired of someone always always having something negative to say in a Big Serious Real Life Issue Plaguing Society way, even when I aggressively try to curate my Fediverse feed to avoid the hot button topics and big life issues (I only look at Subscribed, for one). I already deal with it enough irl and am doing my part with trying to participate in Big Political Actions to make life better, I want to just have fun online and relax after real life, hopefully help and contribute to a FOSS place and feel good about that instead of using one of the big tech platforms, and always end up getting assblasted by someone having to bring up the life issues anyways, even if only as a throwaway joke. I really have to learn to stop going in comments at all. Just post, never comment. Unfortunately I seem to never learn my lesson on that front, and should probably think about how to actually make that behavioral change. I mean, just look at the paragraphs I just typed to you! I hate that it is true about anger producing more engagement than good feelings, and wish I wasn't vulnerable to that too.