Viljandi's city government is in a bind and whether the town hall is occupied by a conservative coalition that thinks showing children a rainbow flag is inappropriate or by some other does not really matter in this case because the predicament is the same for everyone: there is no money in a situation where a great deal of it is needed. The only difference may be where the cuts begin.

The coalition of Isamaa and EKRE appears to have decided that one of its first moves will be to slash in half the budget of Estonia's only puppet theater with its own dedicated stage and, instead of maintaining a permanent small theater, start outsourcing the service. For political forces that verbally place children front and center, the move seems odd, though the previous Reform Party-led coalition had also planned reforms for the puppet theater.

The old, deteriorating section of the sports hall recently had to be closed, one kindergarten and one school need a new building or major renovation, a parking lot must be built for the spa hotel and so on. Yet no revenue source for any of this is in sight. Although occasional waves of economic growth have postponed the issue from time to time, most municipalities beyond Tallinn's "golden ring" have already spent the last couple of decades dancing around a leaky pot of money in a game called "sustainable decline."

And not only municipalities. We can see sustainable decline in one form or another in newspapers with shrinking print runs, in the police decision to effectively stop investigating minor crimes, in the transformation of reflective graduation essays into a two-part native language exam, in the meek surrender to AI-generated work slop and in countless other things besides. The most important tasks still get done, after all, even if perhaps not as well as before, and at least the sustainably declining institutions have not been shut down entirely. Something will remain of the Viljandi puppet theater too, at least for now.

The logic of sustainable decline is hard to resist. We cannot live beyond our means, of course, yet in a world where standing still requires running at full speed, accepting decline often means controlling the downward curve only up to a certain point. Beyond that comes free fall because our capacity to resist unwanted change has disappeared.

From the past 15 years, I can recall only one Viljandi mayor who set the goal of reversing the city's population decline. Did it succeed? No. But if you do not try, you can be certain nothing will happen. And if you stop trying for too long, eventually there will no longer be any strength left to try. As the population declines, so does tax revenue; as revenues shrink, so does the ability to spend and provide services; that in turn reduces the area's attractiveness and the population falls even further. We go with the flow until it swallows us whole.

In the startup world, people often talk about a pivot — a strategic shift in which a company is not liquidated outright, but significantly changes its product, market, technology or some other key aspect. A startup that has failed to achieve its planned success cannot sustainably decline. Startups either grow vigorously or wither away entirely. That is why abrupt changes are more acceptable to them than to companies with a longer history, let alone to states or municipalities.

What is more, the public sector usually cannot, even with the best intentions, turn itself around 180 degrees and race off in the opposite direction because it was created for a specific purpose. Still, both startups and so-called legacy institutions must recognize the right moment when there is still enough strength left to build new momentum, whether that strength takes the form of money, ideas or people.

The greatest danger of sustainable decline lies precisely in missing that moment. Even when the need has been clearly and repeatedly stated aloud and the resources actually exist, it is unimaginably difficult, for a million different reasons, to pull oneself together and refuse to surrender to an imposed sense of inevitability.

One of the clearest examples is the European Union's inability to redirect the enormous sums originally allocated decades ago for agricultural subsidies into science and innovation, even though almost everyone has long understood that without such a shift, Europe has no hope of remaining a serious force alongside the United States and China.

Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was such a decisive event in his rise to power that it is still used today as a metaphor for a step from which there is no turning back. That small river in northern Italy marked the boundary a general was forbidden to cross with his army and crossing the Rubicon therefore meant open rebellion against the Roman Republic. In reality, however, Caesar had little choice. As a gifted military leader and politician, he recognized that not crossing the Rubicon would mean certain ruin, while on the other side of the river lay at least the possibility of success.

Will we — whether as a state, a municipality or a business — recognize our Rubicons in time and dare to cross them? Are we prepared to step into the cold water and take risks or will we settle for the safety of stagnation where by calling it inevitable we can at least avoid being wrong?

Yes, of course sober judgment is necessary and governing, especially in the public sector, must be done responsibly. But one should be careful about making decline itself the objective, even if it is labeled sustainable. Aim high and you may achieve little; aim low and you achieve nothing at all.

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