If there were no taboos on any personal problems topics, casual conversation would be full of people talking about their personal problems, because it is a costless way of diverting conversational attention to themselves. There will probably be lots of people who don’t do it, but they’ll easily lose conversational priority to people who do. And talking to people would suck.
Maybe this is why the concept of ‘oversharing’ was invented – communities decide, somehow, here’s the stuff you can complain about and here’s the stuff where if you talk too much about it we’ll call you an oversharer and shun you. And lines are drawn in different places by different societies.
I think it may be impossible for a community to have zero taboos around casually talking about bad life stuff – if one tried, I think they’ll probably spontaneously reinvent ‘oversharing’ and start shaming people who talked about the now-rude topics.
I also think you can’t propagate separate norms about what to feel ashamed about vs what to feel ashamed about discussing – i.e. you can’t propagate “don’t feel ashamed about your alcoholism, but do feel ashamed about talking about your alcoholism to people not close to you”, but you can propagate “you should be ashamed of your alcoholism, and therefore not talk about it to untrusted people”.
If these things are true, humans as they exist now will never be able to create a society where no one is ashamed of their pain or misfortunes or mistakes. I’ve described a mechanism by which an attempt to create such a society will always fail
I also think you can’t propagate separate norms about what to feel ashamed about vs what to feel ashamed about discussing
I don’t feel ashamed about my bowel movements, but I also don’t talk about them in detail to my friends, and would (properly!) feel ashamed about doing so absent strong justification.
I feel like this relates pretty clearly to recent discourse about sex in public.
…no, seriously, what’s the clear relation? “Without social regulation in the form of taboo, people would always be fucking in public for the sake of getting attention?” The essential mechanics here seem nigh-unrelated.