Story of My Life enjoys quite a lot of popularity, with over 137k followers on Instagram and over 38k fans on Facebook who enjoy candid covers that show how similar all of us really are on the inside.

Try to imagine for a moment that we live in a world where nobody can lie (like in the movie The Invention of Lying) and everyone’s brutally honest with each other. Sounds like a utopia. For a minute. Then you realize what a nightmare it’d be.

Even though we tend to associate brutal honesty with telling the truth, the two aren’t always one and the same. At the end of the day, a person who is honest is telling their subjective truth (lowercase t), not objective Truth (capital T). Is there an overlap between the two? Can some truths be closer to Truth? Of course! But staying humble about our supposed brutal honesty is important as well.

This means that we ought to acknowledge that when we “tell things as they are,” we’re actually sharing opinions that we’re emotionally invested in, not universal facts. Sometimes we find that we’re too categorical and black-and-white in the way we think. Perhaps when we’re being brutally honest, we’re just being brutal. So something that can help you bring some nuance into discussions is changing how we express our ideas and communicate with others.

For example, we can avoid words like always, never, everyone, and no one, as well as such colorful phrases like the fact is, you stupid idiot, I have a PhD and you haven’t even finished high school, and my father will hear about this. Instead, try being more tactful by saying in my opinion, have you thought about..?, or I see your point, but have you considered all of these other valid alternatives?

And be sure to actually listen to what other people believe, especially if you don’t agree with their opinions. Life’s not about being right and pointing out everyone’s mistakes like a judicial robot, it’s about growing as a human being. Now that sounds like a great quote to put on a book cover! Right above a drawing of a robot with a judge’s wig, a laser cannon, and a hat that says, “Well, technically, we don’t dream of electric sheep!”