Abstract: The word “zeitgeist” refers to common perceptions shared between members of a given culture. Meanwhile, a defining feature of loneliness is the feeling that one’s views are not shared with others. Does loneliness correspond with deviating from the zeitgeist? We demonstrate that lonely individuals’ neural and semantic representations of contemporary cultural figures deviate from group-consensus representations, i.e., the zeitgeist. Across two independent brain imaging datasets, lonely participants exhibited idiosyncratic neural representations of well-known celebrities that strayed from group-consensus neural representations in the medial prefrontal cortex—a region that encodes and retrieves social knowledge (Studies 1A: N=40; 1B: N=40). Because communication fosters social connection by creating shared reality, we next asked whether lonelier participants’ communication about well-known celebrities also deviates from the zeitgeist, possibly placing them at a disadvantage in finding common ground with others. Indeed, when a strong group consensus exists for a well-known cultural figure, lonelier individuals use idiosyncratic language to describe them (Study 2: N=923). Collectively, results provide ground truth to lonely individuals’ feeling that their views are not shared with others. More broadly, this suggests loneliness may not only reflect impoverished relationships with specific individuals, but also feelings of disconnection from prevalently shared views of contemporary culture.