Out of control — adrift, with nobody steering.
For a person whose life is a mess, a project with no management, a country badly run. *Andar al garete* is drifting through life. The sea image is still right there in it.
A nautical term: a boat *al garete* has lost its rudder and drifts wherever the current takes it.
Critical about a person — you are saying they have no direction.
Reading a definition isn't the same as saying it to someone. Lingo Kaiava is a voice tutor set to Puerto Rican Spanish — it uses al garete the way locals do, corrects you in the moment, and never "fixes" the way real people actually talk into textbook Puerto Rican Spanish.
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