On Video Calls, I Turn My Camera Off on Purpose
On video calls, Aya deliberately keeps her camera off and lowers her voice. She’s Asian, her face reads young, and the moment she’s on screen, the compliance team tends not to take her seriously.
She sells financial derivatives. She loves change, loves AI, loves new things. But banking, the industry she’s in, stands for stability and order. An infinite player, stuck inside a machine that only wants stability.
She says she’s a free little bird. But she’s afraid of flying.
During video meetings, Aya deliberately keeps her camera off, and she lowers her voice a little too.
She’s Asian, and her face reads young. The moment she appears on screen, the folks over in compliance tend not to take her seriously. So she found her fix: camera off, voice down. When they throw a question at her, she doesn’t rush to answer either; she fires back with “why are you asking that,” tossing the ball into their court and forcing the other side to explain themselves first. She has won quite a few arguments this way, and over the years, Aya’s skill at arguing in English has climbed steadily.
In her eyes, the compliance department spends all day riding the brakes, slowing down her client work and the company’s ability to make money.
She majored in financial management as an undergrad, took a gap to intern at CITIC for a while, then switched to financial analysis for her master’s. After graduating she started in audit, then jumped to a bank to work as a front-office salesperson.
What she sells is financial derivatives: currency exchange, rate locking, spot, forwards, swaps, options, plus credit lines and deposits and loans, often bundled together and sold as a package to corporate clients.
The defining trait of this business is that nothing is standardized. It’s not like the eSIM roaming plan you buy before a trip abroad, where the packages and prices are already posted and you just pick one and pay. Derivative prices move daily with the market and interest rates; you have to watch the screen live and improvise. What the client wants, what the market is doing: the deal has to be negotiated into shape on the spot.
Her most common way of closing a sale: no single product is necessarily the cheapest, but bundle a few together and the total comes out lowest.
There’s some craft in this. Lay the products out one by one and the client can comparison-shop each item, and the margin gets ground down fast. But once everything is wrapped into a single package, the client can no longer take it apart and compare piece by piece. She can give up a little on this product and make it back on that one, push the total to the lowest, and the client feels they got a bargain while the bank’s profit stays intact.
Some difficult clients don’t trust her and go over her head to ask her boss whether this is really the final price. She squares this with her boss well in advance: no matter how the client asks, your answer must match my quote exactly.
Because if the boss ever softened and quoted something lower, the client would instantly understand: go around Aya and you get a better price. From then on, every deal would bypass her and go straight to the boss.
She’s a bit like the products she sells: non-standard, moving with the market, dreading nothing more than staying the same.
Aya says she’s a free bird. She likes change, and she likes technology.
It took me a while to figure out that she’s a bit like what James Carse calls an “infinite player.”
Carse wrote a book called Finite and Infinite Games. Games, he says, come in two kinds. Finite games are played to win: they have a beginning and an end, the rules are fixed, and once a winner is decided, the game is over. A hand of cards, an exam, the climb up the ladder to partner. Infinite games are not played to win but to keep the game going: the rules can change at any time, there is no finish line, and the only way to lose is to quit playing.
Aya plays the second kind.
That’s why she wants to be a boss.
Other people who want to be the boss are thinking about financial freedom, about never working for anyone again. She’s the opposite. She actually rather likes going to work; she looks forward to encountering something new every day.
“We’re all playing ‘Earth Online.’ Work is just one of the levels, and new things pop up every day.”
She can’t bear for this game to stop. But an employee always faces retirement eventually; at 55 you get asked to leave the table. If you want to keep playing, playing for a lifetime, the only way is to become the boss yourself.
Her neighbor’s mother is retired and plays cards every day. Aya doesn’t like cards, and she can’t stand repeating the same thing day after day.
So she envies Trump: nearly 80 years old and still having new experiences every day, living with relish. She admires Musk too, for pushing spaceflight forward. She says it’s a pity she wasn’t a science student. She loves physics, but next to the people who are truly good at it, the gap is just too wide. “If I had that kind of brain, I’d be off upgrading human civilization.”
“AI is what saved my curiosity.”
Whatever she doesn’t understand, she just asks. Her moods sometimes swing hard, and AI explained them to her from the angle of hormones. Once, before an important meeting, she worried that eating breakfast would give her a carb crash, so she had only a cup of coffee. It backfired: halfway through the meeting her hands started shaking, and it threw off her performance. Afterward, AI walked her through that one too, in terms of blood sugar and caffeine.
She also loves having AI play the part of Musk or Trump and chat with her. She wants to know what the people standing at the very top of power and wealth are actually thinking, what they care about, and how they play this game.
She has noticed the differences too: ChatGPT is divergent, good for free-wheeling conversation; Claude is like an engineer, so she uses it for serious business, analyzing financial reports and researching stocks. There have been faceplants, of course. Back when it came down to choosing between MiniMax and Zhipu, she bet on MiniMax and lost badly.
“In the AI era, what I fear most is having nothing to do.”
She’s afraid of life losing its fun, of days reduced to nothing but meals.
Gardening, pets, cards, video games: none of these retirement pastimes holds any appeal for her right now.
She loves AI, loves change, loves new things. But banking, the industry she’s in, stands precisely for stability and order.
AI moves slowly in banks. Even where it’s “in use,” it’s mostly individual employees squeezing out a bit of personal productivity, nowhere near being embedded in company systems. The bank once built an AI assistant for the compliance department, and it didn’t work well. At bottom, AI moves slowly in banking because the benefits aren’t obvious enough, someone has to carry the risk, and the whole decision chain is slow on top of that.
This is the same force as the brake-riding compliance department from the beginning. Stability-seeking, blame-averse, slow to decide, tightly regulated. It picks on her in meeting rooms, and at the company level it keeps AI outside the door. Outside the company, pure fintech entrepreneurship is nearly a dead end: little innovation, slow tempo, strict regulation, high barriers. There’s no growth story to tell, and investment is very hard to raise.
An infinite player, stuck inside a machine that only wants stability.
She’s looking for a change too.
She loves studying people who rose to the top of tech companies without a technical background, executives at companies like Stripe, hunting down their biographies one by one, trying to work out how that path actually gets walked.
She has a few ideas at the moment: go into cross-border payments, or move back to China and join a fund as a salesperson, following the emerging industries. High-Flyer Quant, for instance; that would put half a foot inside DeepSeek. What she really wants is an AI company, but her résumé’s connection to AI is too thin, and it hasn’t gone smoothly.
She has now decided to move back to China.
Life there suits her better, and her best friend has already moved back to start a company, doing well in Chengdu. More importantly, she wants to head to a new map and grind some new quests.
Moving back comes with a side benefit too: no more constant flying.
She says she’s a free little bird.
But she’s afraid of flying.