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
hubris
“Complacency” is a related idea but a bit more general.
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
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.
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.
The concept you are describing is stopping preventative maintenance and discovering the consequences of said. I just don’t have a word for it.
Chesterton’s Fence is the first thing that comes to mind
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
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.
AKA the Sysadmin’s Creed
yes - recrudesence.
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.
unwisdom
I don’t know a specific word, but I always think of it as “closing the umbrella because you’re not getting wet”
Amnesia
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.
