When I went to law school, I had a friend who was in a stable, functional relationship with his girlfriend.
It worked. Not because it was perfect, but because responsibilities were aligned with competence. He handled the household finances. Not out of dominance, not out of habit, but because he was simply better at it. More structured. More disciplined. Less prone to treating money like a suggestion rather than a constraint.
One day, she decided she wanted to take over.
Fair enough. After some discussion, he agreed. He stepped back completely and let her run the show. No interference, no quiet corrections, no behind-the-scenes safety net. Just a clean transfer of responsibility.
Six months later, the situation was in ruins.
Bills went unpaid. Money evaporated into things that didn’t matter. Obligations were forgotten. The system didn’t just degrade—it collapsed into disorder. What had once been stable turned chaotic in a remarkably short period of time.
Eventually, she asked him to take the finances back.
He agreed. But this is where reality reasserts itself in its usual, unceremonious way.
When he handed things over, he passed on a functioning system. Orderly. Predictable. Manageable. When she handed it back, she didn’t return the same thing. She returned a problem.
He hadn’t interfered earlier—deliberately so. The lesson needed to land properly. But now, instead of simply resuming control, he had to repair the damage first. Untangle the missed payments. Stabilize the cash flow. Rebuild what had been quietly dismantled.
And that is never a quick fix.
This is the part people conveniently forget: mismanagement doesn’t just pause a system. It degrades it. It leaves behind structural damage that must be painstakingly corrected before normality can even begin to re-emerge.
The same pattern is playing out on a much larger stage.
If we were to halt the current green orthodoxy today—completely, decisively—we wouldn’t return to some intact baseline. That world is gone. What we would face instead is the accumulated consequence of more than two decades of policy, incentives, and decisions untethered from reality.
We would have to look straight into the abyss we have been carefully decorating and pretending not to notice.
And let’s be honest—that is not going to happen anytime soon.
The idea that we simply stop, reassess, and course-correct in a clean, rational moment of collective clarity is comforting. It is also fantasy. Humans do not abandon their mistakes at the first sign of trouble. They double down. They rationalize. They push further, hoping that one more adjustment, one more justification, one more round of commitment will finally make things work.
It rarely does.
Instead, we go deeper.
Mistakes, especially large and systemic ones, tend to run their full course. They don’t fade politely when questioned. They intensify. They expand. They entrench themselves until the consequences become too obvious, too tangible, too expensive to ignore.
Only then does change occur—and even then, not gracefully.
By that point, the damage is no longer theoretical. It is embedded. It must be unwound, repaired, endured.
That is when real correction begins.
Right now, we are not there yet.
Right now, we are still talking.