Meet 'Brutal Honesty's' Equally Ugly Cousin

I have always disliked the phrase brutally honest despite its positive connotation to many people as something akin to forthright, even when the truth might be unpleasant. Too often, there seems to be an additional connotation/cultural baggage in the vein that truth is somehow more often unpleasant than not.

Said baggage is most often evident in the boastful use of the phrase as a self-descriptor. Most of the time, rude or (at best) blunt would be more accurate, and I take it as a red flag accordingly.

In fact, truth can be pleasant or not, and can be processed rationally or not -- the latter up to and including outright evasion.

That said, at the end of the day, the truth, even if it's unpleasant, is your friend. If a hurricane is coming, you can't run from it if you don't know about it or fail to take it seriously.

Today, I learned of a new phrase that strikes me as about as trendy at brutally honest was at one point when I was young: radical honesty.

Courtesy of a column by Suzanne Lucas, we have the following example making the rounds from the LinkedIn profile of a famous actor:

Was aggressively mediocre at job. Skipped work to be an extra on a Guillermo del Toro movie called Pacific Rim; subsequently let go. Suffered an existential crisis that led to enlightenment regarding the definition of success on one’s own terms. Became an actor instead.

Lucas herself sums this up as outlining [one's] flaws.

As with bluntness, there can be a place for "radical honesty," (or, as it is more commonly known, self-deprecation. A LinkedIn profile (which is a marketing tool) is not that place for the vast majority -- and Lucas shows us exactly what she means by indicating another viral and "radically honest" LinkedIn post whose many compliments failed to translate into a rapid end to a job hunt.

"Well, you're as pretty as any of them, you just need a nose job." -- Cosmo Kramer

It is true that it sometimes takes a real friend to break an unpleasant truth to someone else, and humor about past failures has its place. But communicating those things doesn't take place in a vacuum.

One's purpose and one's audience govern which facts are relevant to bring up and in what way. Whether you think an acquaintance could use a nose job or you know you weren't the best at a past position, telling others about those things isn't inherently necessary or even a good idea.

-- CAV