Our complaints tell us a lot

largely free of them.

They are problems that, if solved, would improve our lives by an increment that is hardly even noticeable.

Anyone who has travelled in a few of the less-than-wealthy countries of this world knows there are billions of people who would crawl over broken glass to be in a place where such complaints were listened to and acted on.

Except when they got here they would probably never make such complaints because they would recognise relative paradise was hard to improve on.

As New Zealand develops as a society, so too do our regulations become ever more stringent as we seek to make life as good as it can be.

But what the complaints show is that while each of those rules brings with it an ever so slight increase in quality of life, so too do they bring a little bit more intolerance.

For instance, 20 years ago few of us would have considered dog poo a problem.

Now dog owners who don’t pick it up can be fined and/or scolded by anyone who witnesses their indiscretion.

Society is moving the same way against smokers and there are fewer and fewer places where they can expect to indulge in their habit without being given the tsk-tsk of disgust from passers-by.

These are things that didn’t bother us before, but bother us mightily now. And rightly so. Standing on dog poo really is foul and walking through a cloud of cigarette smoke is not something you would do willingly.

But we must be careful that our race for a pleasant and annoyance-free life doesn’t strangle the very life out of our community.

A bit of tolerance and ability to turn the other cheek now and then will bring happiness far more assuredly than a dog poo-free beach or being able to ring noise control when your neighbour’s party gets too loud.

Rules, after all, are made to be broken and that will only happen more often if what the rule is supposed to fix wasn’t really broken in the first place.