I'm curious about how "depends on the situation" interacts with the definition of "white lie", which I've always understood to mean "a harmless lie, generally t

I'm curious about how "depends on the situation" interacts with the definition of "white lie", which I've always understood to mean "a harmless lie, generally told to be polite." I'd think that most cases one might come up with as being bad times to tell a white lie would be be cases where it's not actually harmless. Besides, almost everyone is going to answer "fine"/similar to "how's it going?" regardless of how their day has really been. :)