Anxiety. It’s What’s for Thanksgiving Dinner.

It’s not a good year to be a turkey, or a turkey eater.

With avian flu devastating flocks nationwide, the wholesale cost of turkey as of last week stood at $1.66 a pound, up about 70 percent from 98 cents a pound at this time last year.

“That’s a huge increase,” said Mark Jordan, the executive director of Leap Market Analytics, a research firm focusing on animal protein markets. “We had really tight supply, and it’s only gotten worse.”

The retail price of turkey varies wildly this year, and that uncertainty over real costs is just one data point worrying Americans. The Index of Consumer Sentiment, a continuing survey that has been maintained by the University of Michigan since 1958, is the lowest it has been in 40 years. Lower than in the dark, early days of Covid, lower than during the financial crisis of 2008 and lower than in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash.

“It’s very hard to get a majority of consumers to agree on anything. So, for so many to mention high prices is a pretty big deal,” said Joanne Hsu, an economist and the survey’s director. “People are still worried things are going to get worse before they get better.”

Indeed, anxiety seems to be the zeitgeist this Thanksgiving. Unlike last year — when the post-election vibe was anything from broad optimism to shouting into a pillow, depending on your political orientation — the prevailing feeling appears to be “What now? What next?”

It’s not hard to see why. Some 40 million Americans faced uncertainty as their SNAP benefits were suspended during the government shutdown, a disruption that also hit air traffic controllers just as holiday travel became front-of-mind, not to mention hundreds of thousands of federal employees who missed paychecks. The news is rife with headlines about surprise Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, on-again-off-again tariffs and a potential artificial intelligence bubble that could collapse the economy.

And just in time for the holidays, we welcome back the granddaddy of all anxieties — literally an anxiety from your granddaddy’s days: nuclear annihilation. One of the most-watched movies on Netflix this month is Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” in which a rogue warhead of unknown origin cruises toward the United States. Back in real life, there has been saber-rattling from both Washington and Moscow about resuming nuclear testing.

So as you’re stuck in an endless procession of jumbo jets on the tarmac at O’Hare, wondering how you’re going to afford Thanksgiving and whether your flight will even take off, you can at least distract yourself on your phone by watching a fictionalized intercontinental ballistic missile heading toward Chicago.

It seemed only appropriate, then, that the song “Anxiety” by the rapper Doechii went viral on TikTok in February, in some ways setting the tone for — or taking the temperature of — the year that was to follow. “Anxiety, keep on trying me,” the 27-year old musician sings. “I feel it quietly, tryna silence me, yeah. My anxiety, can’t shake it off of me.”

Doechii originally recorded the song on her laptop years ago, but the tune’s catchy hook and jumpy tone read the room in 2025.

Todd Kashdan, a psychologist and the founder of the Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University, used the word “loomingness” to describe this widespread feeling of late — “the fear that a threat is getting closer or moving faster than desired. And so you have no idea how bad this is going to get.”

“It’s like someone is walking behind you at 2 o’clock in the morning,” he said, “and all of a sudden they speed up a little bit.”

As Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, put it: “I wake up and look at my phone in the morning, and there’s a sense of dread in that two seconds between when I turn it on and when I look at the screen to see what has happened.”

He and other economists pointed squarely to that kind of uncertainty, particularly related to tariffs, as the chief driver of consumer angst.

In terms of economic data, “we’re roughly at a B-plus,” said Mr. Wolfers, who has written for The New York Times. “But if you look at measures of sentiment, how people are feeling, we’re at full-on recession levels. People are miserable.”

The Michigan survey reflects these feelings, with broadly negative sentiments from consumers about how their current financial situation compares with a year ago, and whether their real incomes will increase in the next five years.

On one hand, the financial markets are at or near all-time highs. But for every news story about stratospheric valuations of Nvidia and OpenAI, there is at least one other about an A.I. bubble. To say the messages are mixed is an understatement. (And don’t venture into any stock market-related Reddit board, unless you want to end up in a fully dissociative state.)

Beyond A.I.’s influence over the markets, there are jitters about how it will affect employment.

On average, Americans think there is a 23 percent chance they will lose their job in the next five years, which is about as high as that number has ever been, according to the survey. Seventy-one percent of people said they expected unemployment in general to rise.

Then there’s the ambient anxiety about whether what we are seeing, hearing or reading on a daily basis is actually real, or the byproduct of a machine-learning data center in rural Indiana. (Who knew we would one day be nostalgic for human telemarketers?)

One thing that cannot be hallucinated by an A.I., though? Golden-brown, monumental poultry. Which brings us back to the table.

Mr. Jordan, the meat-business analyst, said that even with the high prices of recent years, Americans were still buying turkey.

“I think there’s probably a lot of angst around inflation broadly, but I don’t think that turkey spending will be hit,” he said. “There was a lot of chatter there for a while with a lot of consumers doing beef tenderloins or rib roasts, things like that. Well, anything beef-related is just bonkers now. So people are defaulting back to: OK, well, turkey is the traditional Thanksgiving item.”

In other words, we’ve stopped worrying and learned to love the bird, regardless of price.

And when it comes to that price, well, more uncertainty. Despite the high wholesale costs, the American Farm Bureau Federation last week released the results of its annual national survey of Thanksgiving retail prices, showing that the price of turkey in stores may be lower than last year. But many retailers take a loss on the birds to get shoppers in the door, and charge more for other holiday food items. And another report, produced by Purdue University, predicted that turkeys will cost consumers about 25 percent more than last year.

But to Dr. Kashdan, the psychologist, it’s ultimately the togetherness that matters. When we gather with friends and family, he said, we actually start to perceive their strengths — be they emotional, intellectual or financial — as our own.

“These social gatherings,” Mr. Kashdan added, “are a way for your brain to make a more accurate representation of what powers you have, what resources you have. And you can actually take on more difficulties than you thought were possible.”

So, we gather around the holiday table, united in our anxiety. We self-soothe, take a moment and enjoy what hopefully won’t be the most expensive turkey in human history.

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