I’ll give some examples:
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defunding the prevention of food born illnesses leads to them becoming an issue in 2026
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understaffing IT departments because “we don’t have issues” then issues magically appear when support is taken away (surprised Pikachu face)
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a magic witch preforms a yearly protection circle around your house, but you don’t want to pay any more because the gremlin infestation is gone, but they come back after the protection circle dissipates
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they put armed guards on merchant ships to prevent somali piracy, but then the pirates slowed down so the companies got complicit and now somali pirates are becoming an issue again
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i (in my infinite stupidity) don’t take my medicine because I feel fine, then after a few days I turn into a disaster pile of suicidal ideation and take my medicine to fix it
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screw worms or something idk
but like the problem is in a loop where it just repeats forever because people don’t realize what’s preventing the issue
Chesterton’s fence is mentioned several times here and it’s a good heuristic to avoid the issue. The issue is called the Preparedness Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
Chesterton’s fence
From a parable by G.K. Chesterton, suggesting that one should not remove a fence until one learns why it was erected in the first place.
Seems like your client messed up the original link somehow. It works fine for me.
Ah true, might be a client problem
That’s a different link
Your link is broken, and that’s the source anyway so I thought I’d just link directly
Its not broken. It just links to wiktionary (wiki + dictionary), instead of wikipedia. I think the wiktionary explains it sufficiently.
The url I posted doesn’t have any listed citations?
The concept you are describing is stopping preventative maintenance and discovering the consequences of said. I just don’t have a word for it.
hubris
“Complacency” is a related idea but a bit more general.
Complacency gets close, though I think it’s more for things where you don’t act when you should, and what OP described could almost count as sabotage - the difference between not increasing the range of an alert system (complacency) and taking it down, in both cases because “we haven’t had an alert in X time”
In software development this is called a regression, and it is why we have regression tests. If you don’t run or check the regression tests, the problems they’re testing for can (and do) come back.
In 2013 Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a famous analogy about the US Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act. She said it’s like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” That comes pretty close to your sentiment, OP.
The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”
It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.
We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:
Fumbled the shield
The thing with the witch sounds more like mafiosi protection money.
She sells you the circle, and if you don’t pay, she casts summon goblins on your houseLike God said to Bender in Futurama “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”. I propose calling this Bender’s Paradox.
Vaccines and herd immunity
AKA the Sysadmin’s Creed
Chesterton’s Fence is the first thing that comes to mind
Historical Recurrence
The gremlins always return. That’s why the magic witch offers an annual subscription plan, to protect your investment from up to two types of folklore creatures, ranging from classical antiquity to the early modern period.
My house was haunted by ghosts so bought the annual subscription and they went away. I canceled the subscription and my house got repossessed!
FAFO
In most of your examples I think the word is kakistocracy.
There should be a word.
My father-in-law was not feeling well recently so we took him to the doctor. He presented with very high blood pressure and we were all asking him what happened to the blood pressure medicine he was taking for a decade. He replied, “I stopped taking it because last time they checked my blood pressure it was fine.”
This absolutely needs a word.
This is closely related to all the people in the hospital who are like “I didn’t need all these meds and supportive oxygen at home. The hospital is making me sick!”
