The buddy check

There is a ninety-second ritual at the start of every dive that nobody photographs. Two divers face each other on the boat deck or in the shallows, fully geared, and check each other out loud. Air on. Pressure good. Releases located. BCD inflating. Regulator breathing. Octopus accessible. Weights secured. Each item gets a touch, a tug, a look. The cadence is the same every time. After enough dives, the words lose their meaning and become a kind of song, and that is exactly the point. The check is supposed to be automatic. The check is supposed to happen even when you do not feel like doing it, because the moment you start needing to feel like doing it, it stops happening on the days that matter.

The check exists for a specific reason. Once you are at fifteen meters and your inflator is leaking, the inflator was already leaking. You did not develop the leak on the descent. The leak was sitting in your kit on the boat, two minutes before you got in the water, when catching it cost nothing. The only question is whether anyone looked.

I have been on dive boats where the buddy check was skipped. Quietly, by mutual unspoken agreement, because everyone was a competent diver and we had all done a hundred of these and the boat was tipping and the current was about to change and nobody wanted to be the person who said the boring thing. I have done it myself. I have looked at my buddy on a bench and made eye contact and we have both known the check was supposed to happen and we have both said nothing and gone in. Nothing went wrong, because nothing usually goes wrong, because the failure mode of skipping a buddy check is not failure on this dive. It is a slow erosion of the procedure across many dives, until the dive on which the inflator is actually leaking is also the dive on which nobody looked.

I am writing this site for the same reason the buddy check exists.

I am seventeen. I trade stocks. I do not have a large portfolio. The amount of money at risk on any given decision is small enough that even a complete loss would not change my life. This is the equivalent of being on the boat, in the shallows, with the gear sitting on a bench in the sun. It is the cheapest possible moment to discover that the inflator is leaking. The cost of catching a problem right now is two hours of writing. The cost of catching it in five years, when the portfolio is real and the stakes are different and the procedure has eroded across a thousand small skips, is a portfolio.

So the rules in The Ledger are a buddy check on myself, performed at the only time when performing the check is still free.

The rules do not exist because I expect to need them. They exist because the moment I will need them is also the moment I will be least willing to perform the check. Drawdowns are not when most people read their own rules carefully. Drawdowns are when most people meet their own rules for the first time, discover the rules were vague, discover two of the rules contradict each other, discover they do not actually believe the rules they wrote, and abandon the rules. The rules are then revealed to have been wallpaper. They were not rules. They were aspirations dressed up in the grammar of rules.

The only way I know to avoid this is to perform the check now, in writing, in public, while nothing is at stake, so that the words have time to lose their meaning and become a song before the dive on which they matter.

There is a specific moment that taught me this. On a dive at Tulamben last March, my buddy Kadek caught something on me that I had missed on myself. I had clipped my weight pocket loose. I had walked all the way from the rinse tank to the entry point with one of my weight pockets one tug away from falling out. If I had entered the water like that and the pocket had dropped, I would have shot up uncontrollably from depth, and that is a way divers die. Kadek noticed because he ran the check. I did not notice, because I had run the check on myself two minutes earlier and the song had played without anyone listening to it.

This is the part of the buddy check that is hard to convey to someone who has not stood through a hundred of them. The check works because it is performed by someone other than you. You cannot run a buddy check on yourself, because the version of you that geared up is the same version of you that would verify the gear, and that version is not going to catch its own mistake. The check requires an external pair of eyes. Not because the eyes are smarter. Because they are not yours.

Writing the rules in public, before I have the money, is my best available substitute for a buddy. The reader is not going to catch my mistakes. The reader is not even going to read carefully. But the fact of writing for a reader forces a different version of me to look at the gear than the version that geared up. Writing forces precision. Writing forces me to finish a sentence I would otherwise have left half-spoken in my head. Writing forces me to discover that the rule I thought I had was not actually a rule, because I cannot finish the sentence without contradicting myself.

I have already revised rules in this site that I had been carrying around in my head for months and assumed were fine. I wrote one of them down, looked at the sentence on the page, and realized I had been operating under a rule that did not say what I thought it said. The version in my head had been do not concentrate too much in any one position. The version that came out of my fingers was do not concentrate more than 12% in any one position. The first version was wallpaper. The second version is a rule. The difference is a number. The number is what makes the rule possible to violate, which is what makes the rule a rule.

This is the strange property of pre-commitment that most people miss. The point of writing a rule down is not to remind yourself of it. You do not need a reminder. You will remember. The point of writing a rule down is to test whether the rule survives being written. A surprising number of rules do not. They turn out, on the page, to be feelings dressed up as rules, or aspirations, or sentences that contain the word should, which is a word that has no place in any rule that needs to hold under pressure.

I want to invite you to do a version of this now, before you finish the essay.

What follows is the buddy check I run on myself when I write a new rule or revisit an existing one. There are nine questions. They are not a test. They do not grade you. They will not be sent anywhere. The point is to discover what happens when you try to finish the sentences.

If you filled this out, you have probably already learned the thing the essay is about. Some of the questions had answers ready. Some had answers you discovered by trying to write them. Some had no answer, and the absence of an answer is information you did not have before you tried.

The questions you skipped are the leaks in the inflator. They are sitting in your kit right now, two minutes before the dive, on a bench in the sun. The cost of catching them is whatever you choose to do with the next hour. The cost of leaving them is open-ended.

I have answered all nine of these for myself. Some of them I have answered three or four times, because the first version was wallpaper and the second version was an aspiration and the third version had the word should in it and the fourth version was a rule. Question eight, the one about what would have to happen for me to abandon all of the rules, was the hardest. I do not have a clean answer yet. I have a sentence that is closer to honest than the sentence I had a month ago, and I expect to have a closer one a month from now. The act of writing it down is the practice. The sentence is the by-product.

The reason I cannot run this check on myself, in private, in my head, is the same reason a diver cannot run a buddy check on themselves on the boat. The version of me that holds the positions is the same version that would verify the rules. The verification has to come from outside that version. Writing for a reader, even one I do not know, even one who never finds the page, is the cheapest way I know to install an outside reader inside my own head. The reader becomes the buddy. The writing becomes the check.

The whole site, ultimately, is a buddy check that runs forever. Every essay in The Ledger is the moment two minutes before a dive that has not yet happened. Every protocol is a piece of gear being inspected before it is needed. The Log is the record of dives where the gear was tested and the procedure either held or did not, and where the slips, when they happened, were named honestly so the next check could be sharper.

The check feels paranoid right up until the moment it does not. Once you have caught something on yourself or had something caught for you, you do the check for life, not because you expect to find a problem, but because the cost of doing the check is ninety seconds and the cost of skipping it is open-ended.

This is the first essay in The Ledger because the rest of the essays only make sense if you have already done the check on yourself. The second essay is about what happens when you violate a rule and the ocean does not punish you for it. To understand that essay, you need to have written down rules that can be violated, which means rules with numbers in them, which means rules that survived being written, which means a buddy check you actually performed.

The buddy check is the entry condition for everything else.

It costs ninety seconds. It costs nothing. There is no reason not to do it now, while the gear is still dry.