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
Rebound?
Like if you have migraine headache, take a preventative but when you miss it the headache comes back worse, that’s a rebound headache.
FAFO
hubris
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
“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 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.
Chesterton’s Fence is the first thing that comes to mind
Like 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
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!
In most of your examples I think the word is kakistocracy.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the results of the USA’s (first, in case this ends up needing extra specificity later) civil war are a couple other examples.
Fucking around and finding out
I don’t know a specific word, but I always think of it as “closing the umbrella because you’re not getting wet”
Capitalism
In honor of his excellency “winning” the Iran war so many times, I propose we call it “pulling a Trump.”
