I posted a short thing on Reddit. Some people told me that it's similar to a story by Ursula K LeGuin

I posted a short little story I wrote on Chambers, and someone pointed me to a story that I had never heard of or read. Ignoring the fact that I never read the story or even knew of it, it's obviously possible and likely that I could have thought of it on my own. So, the public question is, how seriously should I take the suggestion that my work is "ripping off" someone else's?<br><br>This is a bit of a loaded question as I'm sure the answer from the community will depend a lot on how similar the two works are. That being said, I was in the process of writing a longer work that incorporates the story I wrote into it, and now I'm not sure if I should continue with it.<br><br>On the one hand, I can continue with the idea and I'll probably rewrite it enough to be 99% similar, 1% unique and get some kind of credit for creating it because I didn't directly steal from the author. On the other hand, I could write the same story, just with the setting, characters, and plot completely different, and people would still probably say it's "inspired by" the author. From the writer's perspective, it's very frustrating to hear that I did not come up with something on my own.