Admittedly the first time I read this I was confused because you went “When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world.” This gave the sense that the issue was with the model of the world and not the world itself. This isn’t what you meant but I made a list of reasons talking is a thing people do anyway:
When you become more vulnerable and the world is less predictable, the support systems you have for handling those things which were created in a more safe/predictable world will have a greater burden. Talking to people in that support system about the issue makes them aware of it and establishes precedent for you requesting more help than usual in the future. Pro-active support system preparation.
Similar to talking as a way re-affirming relationships (like you mentioned), talking can also be used directly to strengthen relationships. This might not solve the object-level problem but it gives you more slack to solve it. Pro-active support system building.
Even when talking doesn’t seem to be providing a solution, it still often provides you information about the problem at hand. For instance, someone else’s reaction to your problem can help you gauge its severity and influence your strategy. Often times you don’t actually want to find the solution to the problem immediately—you want to collect a lot of information so you can slowly process it until you reach a conclusion. Information collection.
Similarly this is really good if you actually want to solve the problem but don’t trust the person you’re talking to to actually give you good solutions.
Even when talking doesn’t seem to be providing a solution, talking typically improves your reasoning ability anyway—see rubber duck debugging for instance. Note that literally talking about your problems to a rubber duck is more trouble than its worth in cases where “I’m talking about my problems to a rubber duck” is an emotionally harmful concept
People are evolved to basically interact with far fewer people than we actually interact with today. In the modern world, talking to someone about a problem often has little impact. But back in the day, talking to one of the dozen or so people in your tribe could have massive utility. In this sense I think that talking to people about problems is kinda instinctual and has built in emotional benefits.
Admittedly the first time I read this I was confused because you went “When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world.” This gave the sense that the issue was with the model of the world and not the world itself. This isn’t what you meant but I made a list of reasons talking is a thing people do anyway:
When you become more vulnerable and the world is less predictable, the support systems you have for handling those things which were created in a more safe/predictable world will have a greater burden. Talking to people in that support system about the issue makes them aware of it and establishes precedent for you requesting more help than usual in the future. Pro-active support system preparation.
Similar to talking as a way re-affirming relationships (like you mentioned), talking can also be used directly to strengthen relationships. This might not solve the object-level problem but it gives you more slack to solve it. Pro-active support system building.
Even when talking doesn’t seem to be providing a solution, it still often provides you information about the problem at hand. For instance, someone else’s reaction to your problem can help you gauge its severity and influence your strategy. Often times you don’t actually want to find the solution to the problem immediately—you want to collect a lot of information so you can slowly process it until you reach a conclusion. Information collection.
Similarly this is really good if you actually want to solve the problem but don’t trust the person you’re talking to to actually give you good solutions.
Even when talking doesn’t seem to be providing a solution, talking typically improves your reasoning ability anyway—see rubber duck debugging for instance. Note that literally talking about your problems to a rubber duck is more trouble than its worth in cases where “I’m talking about my problems to a rubber duck” is an emotionally harmful concept
People are evolved to basically interact with far fewer people than we actually interact with today. In the modern world, talking to someone about a problem often has little impact. But back in the day, talking to one of the dozen or so people in your tribe could have massive utility. In this sense I think that talking to people about problems is kinda instinctual and has built in emotional benefits.