I think a lot of misplaced skepticism about plausible anecdotes on the Internet comes down to the fact that some people basically think of everyone they don’t know as the same person. They’re like “how could anybody have all this mildly unlikely stuff happen to them?”, and they’re implicitly picturing it all happening in one person’s life, rather than being spread across 7.6 billion individual lives.
Okay, sure, for the sake of argument let’s restrict that figure to people over the age of fourteen who have Internet access – that’s still three billion days per day. If you do anything three billion times, even very unlikely outcomes are going to crop up with non-zero frequency.
The question at hand is not “how likely is this anecdote, in isolation?”; it’s “how likely is any happenstance at least as weird as this anecdote, given three billion chances for it to happen in the last 24 hours alone?”
Also, there has to be some credit for the writer, surely, because often the experience isn’t that interesting – it’s just presented for an audience, and the narrator has simply made some funny commentary or added a ‘moral’ that people respond to. They’ve taken something perfectly ordinary and presented it as A Story, but in fact, it’s a common or uninteresting experience that many people would have let pass without comment. It’s the process of telling it that makes it sound unusual, and then people complain that it doesn’t sound real. But slice-of-life stories usually boil down to something perfectly probable and only #mildlyinteresting – “I caught a wild bird,” “a man in a weird outfit came to my workplace,” “I found a weird rock,” “I spoke to a stranger in public,” “a little kid said something offbeat.” All the craft has gone into the framing.
Sometimes your internal narration stumbles over something that’s kind of funny and you notice it. Sometimes there’s a piece that can be detached from the rest of the day, polished lightly, and presented in a specific tone as a cute little anecdote. Sometimes you write down a quick sketch of an experience in a diary or a text and realize that there’s something funny or whimsical about it – change the angle slightly and you can see that it’s story-shaped. So that’s all that my anecdotes are. The Thing happened that was #mildlyinteresting, and there were some words for it, and if you turned it a certain way, it was story-shaped.
With experience, anyone would notice anecdote-shaped bits in their daily life. But really, it’s mostly in the marketing.
“Look at this great rock,” you say, bouncing excitedly up to your friends. “Okay… look… wait… okay, to be fair, it was better when it was wet.” After a certain amount of quiet and subtle licking, you hold it up again. “Isn’t it great?” you say. “Look at the little fossil! That’s the best part.”
(Next time, you’ll know not to bury the lead. You’ll bounce in with a cleverly pre-wetted rock, and say “Guess whooooo’s HERE? It’s my long-dead buddy Fossil George! I last saw him in the Cretaceous!” and people will go “Haha, okay! Sure!” – and they will think, “There’s our friend, the wild fossil person. Things Just Happen To Her. She just finds these things, we don’t know how she does it – it’s stranger than fiction, really.” And someone on the internet might say: “oh yeah, right, we’re supposed to believe you FOUND that? Fake news.”)
Obviously, some people make stuff up to get attention. (If they are good at it, they often go on to create content for a career or hobby. This impulse is perfectly natural, and is one of many ways that children separate reality from fiction.) but I see people calling bullshit in perfectly mundane stories as well, simply because the decoration was a bit too good.
But really, everyone has access to rocks. They’re on the ground! They’re free! Everyone touches them and walks on them at some point every day! It’s all in the marketing! You can polish it up and put it in a fancy setting of precious metal and sell it as a Rare Item for £50, but it’s just a rock, and everyone can get them.
It’s just. it’s just rocks. They tend to come up! They are abundant. Most people will have access to them. It is not surprising that they occasionally are sparkly, or have a fossil in them, or have a pretty stripe, because there are A LOT OF ROCKS.