Between the Burner and the Bank: Rethinking Money, Meaning, and Systems
I’ve lived in two worlds.
The first is where I come from—a small farm in northern Germany. I grew up in a down-to-earth, mainstream environment. My family worked the land, and life was rooted in rhythms shaped by nature and necessity. It was simple. Grounded.
Then, at 17, my life shifted dramatically when I moved to Munich. At age 19, that’s where I met my co-founder and eventually built a startup focused on taxes, dividends, and investment optimization. Today, our clients include major institutions—some of the world’s biggest banks.
This world is something else entirely: anonymous, formal, abstract. It’s defined by systems, optimization, and money. Lots of it.
And then, a few years later, Stockholm happened.
The Third World: Burning, Dancing, Creating
In 2022, I stumbled into Stockholm’s Burning Man community. If you know Burning Man, you get the vibe—radical self-expression, co-creation, and gifting economies. Think ecstatic dance, think art, think collective dreaming. I’ve been part of that scene here for a few years now, even serving as the treasurer for a 4,600-person event.
That experience opened my eyes to something strange and fascinating: so many of the people I met were living double lives.
By day, they held ordinary jobs—engineers, designers, analysts. But in their free time, they came alive: painting murals, building interactive sculptures, organizing workshops on collective healing. And yet, most of them kept their creative selves carefully cordoned off from their economic selves.
Why?
Because in our current system, doing what you love doesn’t pay. And navigating the world of money and bureaucracy can feel like entering a foreign country—especially for those deeply immersed in creative or communal ways of living.
The Money Gap
What I noticed, over and over again, is this painful disconnection: the people building the most beautiful, healing, inspiring things often feel alienated from the systems that could help them grow those ideas. There's fear, anxiety, and scarcity thinking around money. Some even seem to repel it, as if money itself is dirty, or wrong, or incompatible with beauty.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
That insight is what started me down a new path: to imagine and prototype a new kind of economic system. One that isn’t extractive. One that supports regenerative culture. One where creativity and contribution aren’t sidelined by financial survival—but integrated into a vibrant, participatory economy.
A Competition with a Twist
This is where it gets weird—in the best way.
I’m designing an experimental competition. The core idea is to give away €10,000—but not in the usual way.
Instead of a committee deciding where the money goes, the participants themselves would submit creative or regenerative project ideas and vote on each other’s proposals. This isn’t theoretical—this kind of participatory budgeting is already being tested at events like Borderland (a Burning Man-inspired festival in Sweden), where people vote with real money on which dreams they want to help fund.
But I want to go one step further.
What if the €10,000 wasn't distributed in normal euros at all? What if we burned the physical cash—literally—and replaced it with a digital currency that only exists within a closed-loop system?
Here’s how it works:
The burned cash becomes collateral for a new, blockchain-based local currency.
This currency can’t be traded for euros or speculated on—it can only be used within the community of competition participants.
It’s programmed to lose value over time—meaning you’re incentivized to spend it, not hoard it.
This flips the logic of money on its head. Right now, we reward hoarding: the more money you store, the more interest and dividends you get. In this new system, we reward circulation. Money that just sits around becomes worthless. But money that’s used—to create, collaborate, and build—stays valuable.
From System Design to Cultural Transformation
This experiment isn’t just about one-off funding. It’s a seed for a whole ecosystem—one that blends finance, education, governance, and regenerative values.
Imagine:
A parallel economy where decision-making power is distributed, not centralized.
A digital infrastructure built on transparency, but simple enough that you don’t need a PhD or tax advisor to use it.
An educational layer where kids grow up learning how to participate in collective budgeting for their schools—developing the muscle of shared responsibility from the start.
At its core, this is about building a system where participating feels natural. Where the design is intuitive, beautiful, human-centered. Where the infrastructure supports people, instead of making them feel small or excluded.
Why Me?
I’m a systems nerd. I studied computer science. I’ve built fintech products that serve massive institutions. And I’ve spent the last few years dancing barefoot at sunrise with people who are trying to live differently.
This is my attempt to bring it all together: the logic of finance, the spirit of community, the need for cultural regeneration.
It’s big. It touches psychology, economics, education, governance. And honestly, it’s hard to explain all at once. That’s why I’m putting it here—to begin the process of telling the story, inviting collaborators, and building it out piece by piece.
Want to Build This With Me?
If you’re a systems thinker, artist, coder, educator, festival organizer, or just someone who feels the tension between the world we live in and the world we could live in—reach out.
Let’s prototype the future, not just talk about it.
Thanks for reading. If this resonates, feel free to share or subscribe. I’ll be sharing more details soon, including how you can participate in the first prototype.