Highway as Heterotopia

A kinetic theory of neurodivergent belonging

Modern highways have achieved what ancient mystics yearned for: a near-complete dissolution of the self into pure flow state. Merge. Signal. Pass. Return. An ecstatic tumble into a rare condition where neural circuits fuse with a humming syntax of asphalt, paint, and late-capitalist compromise. Merge. Signal. Pass. Return. The driver obeys a silent contract that recodes reality into streaks of color and intervals of trust. Each reflective sign, each neat boundary of paint, carries authority; pure numerical guidance accepted as truth. Through the windshield's tempered membrane, reality arrives pre-arranged, pre-filtered into digestible units of meaning. No handshakes, eye contact, or words uttered. Just merge, signal, pass, return. A shifting parade of dotted lines parcels the raw chaos of being into navigable segments. The act of driving might be humanity's purest experiment in becoming code.

As hills flatten into plains into mesas into mountains,¹ a car transforms. No longer object, no longer possession. The miles peel away its belonging to any fixed point until it becomes pure trajectory. A wheeled mote of compressed personhood careening across terrestrial spacetime, occupants arranged like organs in a body - vital, interdependent, each claiming the space evolution determined. What Foucault glimpsed in mirrors and cemeteries finds its apotheosis here, where self smears across motion, protocol and pattern, obliterating the boundary between in and of.

This marriage of mind and infrastructure feels revealing about the nature of belonging itself—that authentic existence can manifest not through integration with static social structures, but through alignment with systems of pure movement. The highway promises an intoxicating simulation of a perpetual state of becoming, each mile marker a prayer bead through fingers, lending rhythm to the enlightenment inherent in progress for its own sake.

And in this ultimate triumph of systematized existence resides a freedom—liberation through absolute presence, perfectly attenuated to an endless now demanding complete focus and no performance of self. The irony of finding comfort in the liminal is not lost on me.² And that the liminal itself might allow such explicit description feels dubious.

Yet this seems like a true purpose of the highway: to remind us of the fundamentality of liminality and the unavoidable institutionalization of the in-between. From Feynman diagrams tracing the wiggle of particles through subatomic foam to galactic filaments mapping matter on the scale of parsecs, paths will always trace their traveler’s suspension between here and there and now and then. It's not that the liminal should defy description, per se, but that the very act of describing it threatens to collapse its delicate quantum state. The highway-mind exists in superposition: simultaneously hyper-focused and dissolved, precisely located yet everywhere, absolutely present yet outside of conventional time.

And isn't this itself a commentary on³ what is means to be—that sometimes the deepest authenticity emerges not from resistance to structure but from finding the right kind of structure to dissolve into? The language I reach for feels inadequate, but I sense the attempt to describe the indescribable adds another facet to our understanding, not of the thing itself, but of the limitations of language and consciousness when confronted with their dissolution.⁴

But we try anyway, and that's how truth—or at least meaning—gets made. For someone navigating the boundary between different modes of being, this offers comfort: that home exists in the act of transition, in the perfect alignment between consciousness and code, in the endless unspooling of white lines against dark asphalt that somehow transforms the liminal from a space of anxiety into one of grace. Here, the perpetual state of becoming finds its perfect expression in perpetual motion. Merge. Signal. Pass. Return. Onward to nowhere in particular, each moment of presence a small victory against the tyranny of arrival.

1. This piece started as an anecdote about a road trip I took and the positive effects of self-imposed proximity to others.

2. It seems noteworthy that contemporary portrayals of imaginary liminal spaces like The Backrooms tend to be defined by an aesthetic of existential dread.

3. I hesitate to write “neurodivergent” here

4. I think Wittgenstein might call me a tryhard for this. To which I would reply, “I know you are, but what am I?“