Real and imagined (yet heart-felt and real-feeling) friendships

Charles Munger says we should make friends with dead people. It’s my favorite way of describing what happens when you read stories about people long gone. People like Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Asimov, Christopher Hitchens and so on.

These people were original enough to significantly change the course of history. Yet, as impressive as that sounds, most of us can’t be bothered to care enough about them. That all changes when we learn their stories. When we make friends with them.

On this page I have a list with links to the friends I’ve made over the years. Some of them have passed already. Some of them are still alive, but I’ve never actually met them. A few are the flesh-and-bone, had-real-conversations-together kind of friends. Regardless of when they lived or of whether these people are even aware or not of my existence, each one of them is someone I’d gladly hang out with for a cup of tea and a friendly chat.

This list was started on June 12, 2018. It only has a few names on it now. As it grows, I’ll come back and update it.

It will be a slow, long process but, that’s what friendships are: putting in the time and effort to build something meaningful enough to last a lifetime.

The list

Here’s my list of friends (in alphabetical order)*:

• Isaac Asimov
• Marcus Aurelius
• Jeff Bezos
• Warren Buffett
• Noam Chomsky
• Albert Einstein
• Richard Feynman
• Benjamin Franklin
• Hafiz
• Christopher Hitchens
• Carl Sagan
• Susan
• Michel de Montaigne
• Charles Munger
• Elon Musk
• Oana Pellea
• Rumi
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Voltaire

* For some of the friends included here I want to write articles. A sort of profile cards where I put my thoughts about them and traits I find intriguing. I’ll share those cards on this blog also. The people I’ll have cards for will have their names hyperlinked.