May 1, 2017 4
Elf Pavlik & Moneyless Living
About five years ago Elf Pavlik visited me in Ulm for a few days, when I was still studying there. He voluntarily lives without money since 2009 and shared my interest in free software and (at that time) open data. I found his lifestyle very interesting and we spent a few days together and I took this opportunity to ask him an infinite amount of questions. I recorded some of these conversations and had always planned to cut them together and put these recordings online. For various reasons I didn’t do that for five years. My main reason (which seems a bit silly to me now) was that I had owned my camera only for a short period at that time and was unsatisfied with the way how some of the material turned out. But now I finally did cut a short clip from it! You can see the result here:
Moneyless Living / Elf Pavlik / Ulm 2012
(the original file can be downloaded under this link as well).
It was very interesting for me to see how different worldviews can be and meeting Pavlik definitely had an impact on me. Pavlik told me about his further travel plans; he had planned to first travel to Paris for a few days, then Lyon, then to Italy to visit some people and then further somewhere else. I found this quite remarkable, he wasn’t constrained by finances in any way. Money just didn’t play any role for him when planning where to go next (or his life in general). This is in stark contrast to how many people would e.g. plan a trip to Paris (train tickets for probably 100-200 euros, booking an accomodation there, etc.).
Also, my dorm refrigerator was never this full during the whole time I lived in this apartment as it was during the time when Pavlik visited me (because of dumpster diving). Certain things which he said (often casually, when talking about something different) stuck with me as well. Sentences like “what some people consider borders” and other thoughts which are mentioned in the video as well.
