One-upping is often someone trying to prove they still exist, but your stories don’t need to be the biggest to be worthy.
You’re mid-story, finally warmed up, finally feeling a little seen, and then it happens.
You mention you tried trail running for the first time and your knees survived, barely.
They cut in with, “Oh that’s nothing, I ran a marathon in the 80s with a sprained ankle and no water, because we were tougher back then.”
You share a win at work, they counter with a bigger win.
You share a hard day, they raise you a harder day.
You share a funny disaster, they top it with an even funnier disaster.
After a while, you start talking less because you got tired of watching every story become a contest.
If you’ve been on the receiving end of this, you’ve probably asked yourself some version of: Why do they do that? Why can’t they just listen?
If the person doing it happens to be a Boomer in your life, the dynamic can feel extra sharp because the one-upping often comes wrapped in a specific kind of subtext: I still matter, I still know things, and I still get a seat at the table.
What one-upping is really doing
One-upping is a bid for position.
It’s a conversational move that says, “I need to be above you in this moment,” even if the person doing it would never admit that out loud.
Sometimes it looks like bragging, it looks like minimizing, or it’s disguised as “relating,” but it somehow always ends with them holding the microphone.
Here’s the sneaky part: A lot of one-uppers genuinely believe they’re connecting with you.
They think, “I’m showing you I understand by sharing my experience,” but the timing gives them away.
The focus shifts away from your story before it even lands.
Connection sounds like, “That makes sense. What was that like for you?”
One-upping sounds like, “Wait until you hear what happened to me.”
The relevance panic beneath the punchline
If you zoom out, a lot of chronic one-upping is about relevance in the existential sense.
As people age, the world naturally starts offering fewer unsolicited invitations for their opinion.
Some people adapt by staying curious, while others adapt by getting louder.
The loudness is often fear in a trench coat.
In psychology, there’s a concept called identity threat.
When something challenges the story you tell yourself about who you are, your nervous system reacts.
If someone’s identity is wrapped up in being competent, tough, worldly, or “the one who knows,” it can feel weirdly destabilizing to sit across from someone younger who has different knowledge, different values, and a different way of moving through the world.
So, they grasp for what still feels solid: Their past.
They bring up the years they were in charge, the things they survived, the sacrifices they made, and the way it used to be.
They’re proving a point, even if the point is only happening in their own head.
A line I’ve heard in different forms is, “Back then, we didn’t have it easy.”
Underneath that is often: “Please recognize what I carried.”
Why it gets worse in a world that changed the rules
This specific flavor of one-upping tends to spike during big cultural transitions, and we’re living in one.
The modern world rewards different skills than it used to.
Emotional intelligence matters more in many workplaces, technology shapes everyday life, social norms shifted around parenting, relationships, mental health, and identity, and even language has changed, and that can be disorienting if you feel like the dictionary got updated without your consent.
Disorientation can lead to defensiveness.
If someone feels behind, they might try to get ahead by pulling rank.
You see it when a simple story about ordering oat milk turns into a lecture about “kids these days,” or you see it when you share a boundary and they respond with a story about how they never needed boundaries, because they just “handled it.”
Sometimes I think of it like this: When the world stops asking for someone’s opinion, they can start inserting it everywhere, just to prove it still exists.
It’s less about you, and it’s more about their discomfort with not being the default voice in the room anymore.
The hidden cost to you
The obvious cost is annoyance as the deeper cost is what it does to your sense of space.
When you’re constantly one-upped, you start editing yourself in real time.
You shorten stories, keep things vague, and avoid sharing anything tender because you already know it will be minimized or hijacked.
That’s not nothing.
I used to work as a financial analyst, and one thing you learn in that world is how quickly small leaks become big losses.
A little unaddressed pattern becomes a culture, and a little “it’s fine” becomes resignation.
One-upping creates a similar leak in relationships: It drains the feeling of mutuality, turns conversation into performance, and makes you feel like you’re there to provide prompts, not to be known.
It can also mess with your self-trust.
If your excitement is always met with “that’s nothing,” you may start wondering if your life is actually interesting.
It is, and you’re just telling your stories in a room where someone keeps turning down the volume.
How to respond without becoming their audience
If you try to out-talk a chronic one-upper, you’ll lose because you’re playing the wrong game as they’re regulating their self-worth.
So, the move is to stop feeding the contest.
One of my favorite approaches is a simple conversational pivot that sounds almost boring, which is why it works.
I’ll acknowledge what they said, then return to my original point: “Wow, a marathon with a sprained ankle sounds brutal. So, anyway, what surprised me about trail running was how quiet my brain got.”
That “so anyway” is magic as it’s you reclaiming the thread.
Another approach is to gently name the pattern in the moment, without attacking character: “I notice when I share something, we jump pretty quickly into a bigger version of it. I’d love to finish my thought first.”
If that feels too direct for your situation, you can make it lighter with a “Hold on, let me land the plane, then I want to hear yours.”
You can also ask questions that shift them from competing to reflecting.
Competition thrives on quick comparisons, while reflection slows things down:
- “What did that time in your life feel like for you?”
- “What do you miss about that era?”
- “What was hardest about that?”
If they’re capable of emotional depth, this gives them a different way to feel seen that doesn’t require stepping on you.
Sometimes the most practical tool is a limit, a simple one: “I’ve got about ten minutes, then I have to run.”
When someone reliably makes every conversation about themselves, time limits are self-respect in calendar form.
What to do when the one-upping turns into invalidation
There’s a difference between “I also have a story” and “your story doesn’t count.”
If you’re dealing with the second one, your job becomes protecting your inner experience.
When someone responds to your stress with “try working two jobs and raising three kids,” they’re ranking suffering.
You can respond with a calm refusal to compete, such as“I’m not saying my situation is the hardest. I’m saying it’s hard for me,” or, even simpler, “Yeah. Still hard.”
That line is surprisingly powerful because it doesn’t argue with their past, and it doesn’t surrender your present.
If they push, you can step out of the ring entirely: “I’m not looking for a comparison right now. I’m looking for a little understanding.”
If they can’t offer that, you’ve learned something useful about what that relationship can and cannot provide.
When you actually want the relationship to work
Sometimes the one-upper is your parent, your aunt, your older coworker who can also be generous, funny, and weirdly sweet when they’re not performing for relevance.
If you want to keep the connection, it helps to give them a role that isn’t “competing narrator.”
Many people calm down when they feel useful in a specific way.
So, you can invite contribution with a clear container:
- “I’m deciding between two options. Can I get your advice on just that part?”
- “I’m trying to learn how you handled uncertainty at my age.”
- “What’s something you wish you’d done differently in your 40s?”
This does two things: It honors their experience, and it sets the topic so the conversation doesn’t become an endless reel of greatest hits.
I’ve also found that shared activities can soften the dynamic.
Conversation-only relationships put all the weight on talking; when you’re doing something together, the need to dominate the narrative often drops.
I’ve spent enough mornings at farmers’ markets to notice that people who are prickly at dinner can become totally different humans when they’re handing someone a bunch of kale and chatting about tomatoes.
Some folks don’t know how to connect face-to-face anymore unless there’s a task holding the interaction.
A kinder reframe that still protects you
Here’s the reframe that helps me hold compassion without volunteering to be flattened: One-upping is often someone trying to prove they still exist.
That just means you can stop taking it personally.
You can see the fear without adopting it, you can recognize the longing for relevance without surrendering your voice, and you can decide, moment by moment, what kind of access someone gets to you based on how they handle your humanity.
If you’ve been shrinking in conversations because someone else keeps expanding, consider this a small permission slip to take up your space again.
Your stories don’t need to be the biggest to be worthy because they just need to be yours.
If You Were a Healing Herb, Which Would You Be?
Each herb holds a unique kind of magic — soothing, awakening, grounding, or clarifying.
This 9-question quiz reveals the healing plant that mirrors your energy right now and what it says about your natural rhythm.
✨ Instant results. Deeply insightful.
