WHILE I appreciate it’s something of a cliche, I’ve been thinking this week about how - as Joni Mitchell once sang - you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

I was looking at photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Roads and homes destroyed, communities and families utterly devastated by nature at its most violent.

These people were happy and safe in their homes, concerned about the incoming weather but confident they’d probably be all right.

Then their homes were gone, maybe their families too. They have no clean drinking water or electricity, very little support from their government, and little communication service to check on others or let people know they are safe.

I can’t begin to imagine how awful life must be for the people affected by this or any disaster - natural or man-made - but at least I can change the channel or move on.

I’ve written before about putting things into perspective and it sometimes it takes a genuine tragedy to shake us out of the everyday drudgery and the things we moan about which, on the whole, just aren’t that bad.

We British are a proud nation of complainers, but it seems to me there are two levels of awareness that seem to have sneaked into modern-day complaints.

The first are those who are aware of the pointlessness of their ‘problem’, but still want to moan about it - “They’ve changed the size of a chocolate bar?! Rubbish! But, I suppose kids are starving in third world countries, so...”

The others are completely oblivious to how ridiculous their overreaction might be, but rally their troops like Custer at Little Big Horn.

Usually with Caps Lock on.

“HOW DARE THEY CHANGE THE NUMBER OF PYRAMIDS ON A TOBLERONE? UTTER SCUM, THIS IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD, JUST BECAUSE SOME KIDS ARE GETTING FAT.

“I’LL NEVER EAT ANOTHER ONE, AND I’VE SET UP THIS FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN TO MAKE THEM CHANGE IT BACK TO HOW IT WAS - WHO’S WITH ME?!”

I’ve said previously how much I’d like to just switch off all my social media feeds, forget about the news for a bit, and just enjoy life, and I’m getting a bit better at it. Limiting social media time and switching off the work phone outside of hours gives you more time to enjoy the everyday things that get lost while you’re reading rants about this politician, that protest or the movie that I’ll never watch.

However, this week I found myself seconds away from making one of these pointless complaints, thanks to an inherent fear and suspicion of change, when Twitter announced it was experimenting with doubling tweet size.

If you’re not a Twitter user, its selling point has always been brevity, and there’s a knack to squeezing all the relevant information for a thought, mood or news story into 140 characters.

So when they announced they’re rolling out a character limit of 280, thousands took to the site to express their thoughts - mostly through arguments involving sarcasm and Nazis.

One of the best things about Twitter is that it practically forces users to craft one-liners - maximum information, minimum space - but this changes all of that.

Now, those rants will be longer, the threads even more so, allowing for rambling trains of thought (a bit like these columns) that act as a sort of therapy (a bit like these columns) and are read by millions (unlike these columns).

Suddenly I felt a sense of unfairness that I’d spent years forcing myself to craft 140 character tweets only to have the goalposts moved for no good reason, and was about to take to social media to say as much. Then I remembered, it doesn’t really matter.

Ranters are still going to rant, so just leave them to it and remember those people who are utterly helpless, who’ve lost their homes, families and lives through no fault of their own.

They don’t give a damn about whether a sports team knelt during the national anthem, or if a celebrity’s son smoked a cigarette, they’re just struggling to pick up the pieces.

So next time I find myself getting riled up about something online, I’ll try to take a minute to remember that sentimental 47-year-old song and back away from the social media.