Featured in this blog:

The Double (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1846)

“This Masquerade” (Leon Russell, 1972, The Carney) 

“This Masquerade” (George Benson, 1976, Breezin’) 

Pluribus (Vince Gilligan, 2025, Apple TV)

“Stranger in a Strange Land” (Leon Russell, 1971, Leon Russell and the Shelter People)

“Nature Boy” (eden ahbez, 1947)

Loneliness in modern life often feels like an estrangement from ourselves as much as a separation from others. Two writers, Dostoevsky and musician Leon Russell, separated by 125 years, struggled with this same experience that many write about with increasing fervor and pain today. From “the loneliness epidemic” to the “quiet divorce,” from a “low social battery” to “ghost mode,” we are dealing with an ache that isn’t new even if it feels like it’s accelerating down to unbearable depths. Strangely, George Benson’s version of “This Masquerade” reveals a path out from this existential doom loop, simultaneously improving and softening the feeling, while he literally performs a solution to the song’s emotional stuckness. Thanks, George Benson.

So, where do we start? Let’s start with the opening of “This Masquerade,” a Gen-X hit song made famous by Benson but originally written from the pain that Russell was experiencing while his marriage was falling apart and from the pressures of making it big as a weirdo long-haired gospel honkytonk singer from Tulsa. 

Are we really happy with 

this lonely game we play,

looking for words to say?

Searching but not finding

understanding anyway.

We’re lost in this masquerade.

Russell was a master of bewilderment and disorientation in his songwriting.  He was not necessarily a master of finding his way out, but rather a master of bringing across the feeling of confusion through his lyrics. He knew all about alienation and not fitting in. The lonely game he refers to in this particular song is a game he was playing with his wife at the time: a ‘choreography’ of interaction but a feeling of being all alone. While Russell was referencing his own life, this sense of being unseen in the midst of a festive party (while others portray that remaining hidden behind masks is fun or alluring) is deeply sad, and an experience that many people are having these days. 

Dostoevsky, too, was good at portraying the desperation of isolation. So good that when writing in mid-19th century Russia, his work was reviewed horribly and he suffered financially as he was delivering some of the most important existential novels ever written. His novella, The Double, covers a lot of the same territory of Russell’s song, but in a way that expands the dread and loneliness to epic proportions. Golyadkin, the protagonist, is completely losing his grip on reality as his shame about not belonging is complicated by his aching to be seen as legit and as fitting in socially. All of this comes across as terribly broken and mortifying, skulking around, lost in the masquerade.  He can’t “fake it ‘til he makes it” because he knows and feels too much of what all of this feels like: to be a nobody in society and not be able to find his place or climb a social ladder effectively. It’s excruciating, self-deluding, and horrifyingly relatable. 

He imagines seeing his “double”—his doppelganger—out in the world, and this doppelganger becomes everything that Golyadkin isn’t: smooth, successful, accepted, respected; and this difference mocks Golyadkin’s inner reality, driving him further into madness. Russell is bemoaning the masks that keep us hidden and lonely, while Dostoevsky is describing the horror of the mask coming to life and that the world actually likes and prefers our masks (prefers the masquerade ball) more than it wants the humans who are suffering underneath or in the shadows.

If we really had a choice between being who we really are or being what others want and expect, it seems that many of us would choose the relief of at least having our mask accepted and celebrated by others. But either way, we can feel split by the difference between what we feel and what others want. And here is where we can really go wrong. Loneliness does not come just from being rejected or unseen by others. Loneliness is compounded by rejecting our own true selves and our own feelings. We might say that Russell feels pain because he and his wife couldn’t drop their mutual performance. Golyadkin goes mad because the distance between the inner feeling and the outer performance becomes greater by the hour. 

The isolation that many of us feel is quite real, but the deepest problem in the loneliness epidemic is not the lack of relationships but the lack of relationship with ourselves—that we don’t know, relate to, or acknowledge our own feelings. How can we enter a relationship and feel connected without having a self that is entering the relationship? This is solved first by learning how to be our own honest and caring companion (not easy!), and only then can we know how to feel companionship (rather than just perform it) with others. 

Anyone who has watched the first season of Vince Gilligan’s show, Pluribus (2025), knows that the protagonist, Carol, has integrity about what it means to be human but she has been utterly incapable of being a good and loving companion to her own pain, grief, and rage. Instead, she impulsively acts out these feelings against others (which keeps her ostracized from the few remaining humans on Earth). 

The deepest way to be lonely is to be deeply disconnected from oneself. The greater one’s connection (emotional connection, loving connection, felt-acceptance connection) with oneself, the more available we are for connection with the other few humans who may be around us, available for real connection, and worth connecting with. 

In Dostoevsky’s vision of existential loneliness and despair, Golyadkin is so anxious and overwhelmed and ashamed—so spun up by his despair—that he can’t self-regulate enough to shift gears, to find another way to cope and ‘come home’ to himself. That might be the near-breaking-point where some of us reach out for a reassuring podcast, a meditation practice, a therapist, a knitting group, an exercise routine, formal psychoanalysis, strong drugs, travel, hospitalization, something to help us break from our stuckness, the pit, the endless and empty routine. 

The connection between Russell and Dostoevsky resonates intensely in contemporary life. Social media replicates Golyadkin’s double in digital form: curated selves that compete with, distort, and cannibalize our real self. The gap grows wider between our Golyadkin and our Double. Our relationships increasingly resemble the song’s masquerade not only online but in our awkward attempts to meet and connect in real life as we find fewer opportunities to practice and our increasing awkwardness sabotages our enjoyment. We get exchanges of images, postures, and performance that feel uncannily similar to our real selves, but not quite (which fuels our shame). The loneliness that results is subtle but pervasive. We may not be alone—but we do not know where our real selves reside, or whether anyone can access them, or how to feel a vague comforting connection with the crowd we are in.

Russell’s song “Stranger in a Strange Land” (no relation to Heinlein’s book) puts a fine point on the universality of this lonely feeling, recognizing this condition as basic and critically important:

When the baby looks around him,

it’s such a sight to see.

He shares the simple secret with the wise man:

he’s a stranger in a strange land. . . .

Well, I don’t exactly know what’s going on in the world today;

Don’t know what there is to say about the way the people are treating each other;

Not like brothers. 

The more we feel like strangers, the more we damage others and our environment. How do we move from being strangers and harming each other to becoming seen and found and connected? 

Treating each other like brothers, learning how to feel connected and less lonely is given as the solution in the strange and very short song, “Nature Boy” by eden ahbez (who lived homeless, under the Hollywood sign in the 1940s and hand-delivered this song to Nat King Cole’s colleagues after hearing Cole sing at a performance in LA). Nat King Cole then had a huge hit with this mysterious song:

A little shy and sad of eye but very wise was he.

And then one day, one magic day he passed my way.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings,

this he said to me:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn

is just to love and be loved in return.

But that’s a solution without a pathway to get there. How do we get there? Here’s the hard part: the path to connection is through the land of alienation, the feeling of longing and isolation. Not by describing, conquering, avoiding, or ‘mastering’ it, but rather by inhabiting and aching in the strange land, we come upon the inner secret: the capacity of being able to feel can become the capacity to love my own feelings as belonging in me. My feelings become less like strangers. The capacity to love my feelings as lovable leads to not just a willingness but an insistence on taking off the mask and being seen (perhaps with real caring for the effect of our doing this on others, but not a repression of ourselves in fear of that effect).  

My inner acceptance of being loved (by myself) makes it possible to endure the rejection I will inevitably feel from some people sometimes. That love is a protection. But it is also not enough. A willingness to love others comes from a feeling of being loved, which can come from the capacity to love myself if I have felt unloved by others; and yet, if I have this capacity to express love and care toward others, my gestures of love will often be rejected by others who can’t yet feel loved (or simply don’t want it from us). To live through that and not lose hope requires that we endure the sadness of that pain (like Russell) rather than denying it (like Golyadkin)—that we do not become alienated from ourselves. 

And that’s where George Benson comes in. Leon Russell made a lot more money from this song after George Benson got hold of it and released his version. Some might say that Russell’s version was sadder, simpler, and Benson’s was smoother and more pop and listenable. But here’s something else: Benson was an aficionado of scat-singing, and in particular a form of scat called “doubling” (this is not a coincidence). Doubling is when a singer uses their voice to resonate and mimic the music that an instrument is playing in a song, such as the jazz guitar in “This Masquerade.” In his version, Benson both doubles the guitar and also improvises all around it in his own emotional wanderings. Rather than the double expressing a nauseating split as in Dostoevsky, this musical doubling is about remaining extremely close, to the guitar and to himself. What is the psychological effect of doubling? If you are listening closely, the effect is to feel the phrasing and mood and breath of the song in your body rather than in your head. Instead of thinking about the meaning of lyrics, it’s more an experience of being moved around and impacted by the sounds. It is a shortcut to a direct, internal feeling that Benson’s voice creates—even more of a straight shot to your guts and chest and lungs from feeling connected to the human instrument of Benson, than what a piano, horn, or guitar produces when we hear the same notes. In that doubling of music is a hint at the route we can take to being found in the masquerade. I find myself by listening, attuning, resonating with my own bodily feelings, my emotions as they are playing themselves out in real time. I feel my feelings. I notice my body by listening with my body.

The better I become at this resonance-with-myself, with my own feelings as they are happening, the more I come home to myself. It’s as if Benson provides the solution to being lost in the masquerade in the prelude to the song itself—before the story even starts. In Benson’s version, we can be sorrowful about the loneliness within a relationship but without being estranged from our own bodies.  There is a term from engineering and psychology: syntony. Syntony means the exact match of vibration between one instrument or thing and another. Syntony is a way of talking about how we can ‘vibrate with the world’ around us. And the changes in one instrument (or person) can lead to a matching shift in the other instrument/person when they remain in syntony. 

Syntony is about being attuned to others and affected by others (some people do this way too little, and other people do this way too much—a Goldilocks ability and control over one’s syntony is optimal). Benson demonstrates how syntony with the guitar is also happening instantaneously, unconsciously, in flow with his internal self. Being in syntony with his own feelings and impulses is expressed as a deep form of integrity—an emotional, bodily, and existential integrity that often feels joyful or inspiring to others who then get to feel a little of what that might feel like in themselves. What a counterpoint this is to the themes and pain of “This Masquerade”: no split, no alienated doppelganger, no hidden unmet truth. Rather, an immediate, felt, expressed wandering. A melodic ‘nature boy’ who may be homeless and of low status, but in tune with something inside and expressing it to the outside in a way that invites others to connect and feel less alone in that moment. An invitation for others to dance by our dancing more openly and freely. Performing, perhaps, but not performative. 

To be found in this masquerade requires this kind of dancing, expressing, and experimentation. It requires nerves and guts—that is to say: it requires a body that is willing to be a body rather than a consumer-of-content or a brain-in-a-vat; it requires a resonator and expressor of feelings (even bad feelings), rather than just an information gatherer and productive worker. Naturally, therapy is one place we can find an opportunity to make a useful and helpful mess with this—to practice this kind of otherwise embarrassing, humiliating, or just plain awkward struggle. Individual therapy, couples therapy, and group therapy provide different kinds of risk, exposure, trust, and relief. And there are certainly many other paths toward this kind of personal growth and depth. The key is to be willing to be lost; to acknowledge the masquerade; to tune into the feeling and say “yes” to it, rather than running from it.  If your efforts to feel more connected, more in the world, and less lonely have failed, I’m sorry. It’s very hard to do this kind of work. Finding the right helpers can be a terrible slog with a lot of frustration and con artists and dead ends. And sometimes the right helpers come in disguised and surprising forms. This is an age-old struggle. It is the desperate and anguished engine that has given rise to most of our artistic treasures. And it sucks. And you are not alone in this masquerade.