The Beauty of Erratic Ephemerality

A defense of hitchhiking in an overly optimized world of stagnation

Whenever I stick my thumb out, I feel the same faint embarrassment I did the first time. It is a small, undignified gesture: I am admitting I cannot get where I am going by myself. I am asking a stranger to make my problem theirs.

Cars rush by with the uniform anonymity of sealed capsules. I see only silhouettes behind windshields, flickers of faces, the reflection of the sky. The world moves past at 60 miles an hour, soundless and closed. Every so often, a pair of brake lights flare, and a car drifts onto the shoulder. A window rolls down. The capsule opens. The bubble pops.

We live in nested bubbles—our communities, our friend circles, our social media feeds. Our movements are unremarkable. Our conversations are predictable. The people we physically sit next to might differ slightly in age or background, but they are usually members of the same broad tribe. Political scientists call this an echo chamber; I call it a bubble of stagnation and suffocation. Our conversations follow the same beats as we traverse the same well-trodden trails. The world we move through feels large and dynamic, but is, in practice, very small and habitual.

When I hitchhike, my world is whoever decides to stop. I have gone from the passenger seat of a Porsche 911 to a ‘92 Ford Taurus that broke down while I was in it, in the space of an afternoon. I’ve been picked up by oilfield workers and Marxists, by people who remember WWII and 16-year-old schoolgirls, men who have never left the state and women who have crossed oceans. For a brief sliver of road, the invisible social scaffolding that keeps us sorted—income, education, politics, geography—falls away. 

We are strapped into the same metal can, watching the same strip of asphalt unwind. A veteran with a faded ‘don’t tread on me’ tattoo explains how watching war crimes in Afghanistan dismembered his identity, alienated him from everything he thought he knew, and tore his marriage apart. I watch tears splash against the rusted-out frame of a Toyota, which doubles as a 63-year-old cashier's home. A nurse, motoring to her night shift, mutters about opioid withdrawals and death in the same breath that she asks if I’ve eaten. A pilot confesses he’s jealous of “kids like me” and then admits he hasn’t talked to his own children in years.

Many conversations in regular life are layered in choreography. We dance around each other’s reputations, roles, and online personas. With people in our orbits, there is an awareness of the afterlife of words: how you will be perceived, interpreted, understood–or not. You are not just talking to the person in front of you; you are talking to everyone who might someday hear about what you said. We are carefully pruning the hedge of social perception.

When I hop into a stranger’s vehicle, I am vulnerable. I likely look tired, dirty, lost. I usually have a broken bike by my side or my skis over my shoulder, smelling like someone who has been standing in one spot for longer than makes sense in our era of instant gratification and efficient transportation. But my vulnerability has a socially disarming effect. Drivers are often tense at first. Their eyes flit over me, lingering on my pockets and the mysterious contents of the bag I carry. They might not know why they picked me up, and I may not know why I decided it was safe–or at least an acceptable risk–to step inside their vehicle, but the mutual trust we place in each other builds a deep connection before their car ever comes to a complete stop. There is a moment when the atmosphere changes. The mutual risk–the unnerving assumption that a stranger might be dangerous–is acknowledged, inspected, and then rejected. The bubble pops.

I’ve had people tell me about crimes they never got caught for, about estranged siblings, relapses, about secrets they’ve never told their partners, about opinions that normally stay hidden behind a veil of scared protection. I’ve heard confessions of affairs, abortions, and secret ambitions. I’ve heard the most vitriolic slurs and listened to life-altering stories of unalloyed compassion. I have been asked if I believe in God by someone who clearly hopes I say yes, then listens quietly when I say I don’t think so. 

There is a particular purity to these exchanges because neither of us has much to gain or lose from managing impressions. I am not angling for validation. They are not hoping for a promotion. There is no shared social circle. When they drop me off, I will step out into a parking lot or interstate off-ramp and walk away. If I choose, our narratives will remain unlinked beyond the confines of the moment.

We talk, not as representatives of anything, but as two humans who happen to be pointed in the same direction for a little while. The ephemerality of the relationship removes the worry of being perceived. In a world where so much speech is performative, recorded, and replayed, hitchhiking conversations are anachronistic: free, consequence-light, and brutally sincere. The impunitive candor is intensely cleansing–for them and for me. The person I am in that car does not have to perfectly match the person I want to be at home, at work, online. I can let loose a different version about myself—less ambitious, more certain, more broken, more hopeful—without committing to it. The driver can do the same. 

The result isn’t always “truth” in the factual sense, but it is honest in the emotional sense. What we say is what we feel, right then. It doesn’t have to survive beyond the next off-ramp. I have yet to find a space with such an intense degree of emotional authenticity and no-holds-barred verity. The car becomes a confessional without a priest, a therapist’s office without a file.

In a hitchhiked car, words fall heavily upon my ear. Because the words will never travel beyond the car, the meaning they carry is voraciously pure. Not every ride is profound, but the insight I cull from the rides that are is often worldview-shaping. The space I share with strangers is such a unique forum that there is a brilliance even in the silent stretches, where both of us stare out the window and let our thoughts settle. To be comfortable in silence with an unknown other is a liberating affirmation of self–a realization of the sanctity of human interaction.

In a hitchhiked car, there is no before and usually no after. There is no stereotype for who is going to pick you up or what you might learn. But the people who pick me up all have a reason, conscious or not, for picking me up. Some have stories to tell while others lean towards me with unspoken questions, and, therefore, in some quiet way, are already on my side before I even close the door. The consequence of this selection bias is simple: I never have a boring ride. The kind of person who cannot drive past without at least thinking about stopping is who I meet, again and again. Hitchhiking, if nothing else, is a filter for interesting humans.

To be open to hitchhiking is to admit that you have something to be gained, and it is an acceptance that the thing you need and the knowledge you pick up is not at your discretion. The driver and the hitchhiker begin as strangers. We will end as strangers unless we both consciously decide that we want more–an exchange of numbers or the promise of a postcard. What happens in between is self-contained, if we choose.

This knowledge changes what people are willing to say. A veteran who has yet to tell his wife that he no longer loves his country confesses so at seventy miles an hour. A woman admits, for the first time aloud, that she doesn’t want to go to college—even though her parents assume she does. A prison guard tells me of crimes he’s committed. A banker tells me he’s interested in the idea of communism. A married woman shows me a necklace her ex gave her, which her husband thinks was her mother's. There is no incentive to polish the story. I will never meet the people they are talking about. I will never verify the facts. They are not curating for posterity; they are just unloading.

I feel the same freedom. It is easier to admit my own doubts, failures, petty grievances to someone I will never have to sit across from at Thanksgiving. It is easier to say, “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” to a stranger in a passing town than to someone who will be there to see how it turns out. I have no difficulty telling strangers what I felt like at the lowest moments of my life, but I still haven’t told my Dad about how crippling my depression was last winter. 

All of this rests on a deeper, less obvious argument for hitchhiking: it reintroduces serendipity into a world hellbent on erasing it. Everywhere else, we are guided by invisible rails and coercive hands. Algorithms tell us what to listen to, what to watch, and who to date. Navigation apps select the fastest route, dictating what we see and where. Planes turn cross-country journeys into compressed, controlled capsules where even turbulence is a managed inconvenience. Our days are broken into calendar blocks, our work reduced to timesheets, our entertainment into recommended queues. We have optimized away so much of the unknown that we’ve started to believe that safety is the absence of surprise.

Standing on the shoulder of a highway with my thumb out is, by all contemporary measures of productivity, almost absurd. I don’t know who will pick me up. I don’t know when they will pick me up. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the town I circled on the map that morning, or some different town I’ve never heard of before the driver says its name. From a purely logistical standpoint, this is stupid. From a humanistic standpoint, this is brilliant. From a financial perspective, this is perfection.

Sometimes, hitchhiking is inconvenient. I’ve stood in Nor’Easters and under the relentless summer sun. I’ve had countless run-ins with law enforcement, who despise hitchhikers (hitchhiking is illegal in New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Utah, and on all Interstate ramps; It is almost universally frowned upon elsewhere). I’ve slept in odd places because the ride I got left me forty miles short of where I thought I’d be. Serendipity is not always romantic in real time. The erratic nature of hitchhiking is a reminder of all the things modern society attempts to tamp down: inefficiency, randomness, spontaneity, uncertainty, and a touch of danger. But the erratic is what gives me life, and a society devoid of these nouns is flat and machined. In the boredom, the anticipation, the danger, the unreliability, there are things to be learned from yourself and the people who fill in the gaps between the boredom and the danger. 

The rides that matter–the ones that change the way I view the world–have come from that willingness to let go of control. They are the rides where I pause before hopping into the car because I’ve stereotyped the driver from their appearance, and the person I think they might be is scary to me. Or the rides that take me well off course. Many of the best stories in my life and most unique experiences were not neatly planned. They arrived as brake lights flickering on a distant bumper and a stranger rolling down a window to ask, “Where you headed?” 

Last year, I wrote a piece on my experiences hitchhiking back to school through Upstate New York after my bike was stolen and broken in Ontario. It was the best thing I wrote for my creative non-fiction class, and my professor told me, “See what happens when you get off your bike, even if not by design.” I responded, “Perhaps especially if not by design.”

We are taught to worship efficiency: to minimize uncertainty, maximize output, engineer away risk, AI away any ineptitude in the system. Hitchhiking is inefficient by design. Its point is not to arrive faster, but to arrive differently and/or by necessity. In the carefully sealed system of modern movement, in a world where “AI-powered efficiency” is horridly inescapable, hitchhiking is a small intentional crack–a crack just wide enough for unfiltered humanity to slip through. 

I’m not naive about the fact that hitchhiking carries risk. I am stepping into a car with someone I don’t know. They are letting someone they don’t know into their space. There are stories–some real, some embellished, some outright invented–that suggest hitchhiking is not worth the risk. But society’s fear of hitchhiking is overblown. The act enjoyed widespread popularity until the 1970s, when a combination of factors, including the release of the 1974 movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which depicted a cannibalistic hitchhiker, turned the tide of public opinion against hitchhiking. Since then, hitchhiking has been widely demonized by sensationalized media in society’s contemporary fight against anything unscripted, unruly, or unprofitable. Our culture of worship for convenience that is so eager to trade freedom for the anesthetic drip of efficiency, is quick to pathologize hitchhiking. 

My status as a straight white male insulates me from many of the worries of hitchhiking. I understand not everyone has this privilege. Hitchhiking is also not a ubiquitously romanticizable endeavour. For many, hitchhiking is the last resort; an embodiment of rock bottom, a necessity, not a privilege. For me as well, hitchhiking is often an unplanned crutch I lean against at my lowest moments. 

However, the reality of hitchhiking, at least in my experience, is much quieter than pop culture makes it out to be. Hitching looks like a long ledger where almost every entry is one of mundane kindness, and the occasional entry is an uncomfortable moment that I escape as soon as I can. I can’t ignore the unsettling rides I’ve had with white nationalists, psychotic drivers, and fiends on the lookout for sex. But even these encounters are a profound lesson in humanity. Engaging with the derisive and counter-cultural ‘Other’ is incredibly uncommon. Being locked in a car with these people can be terrifying, but these interactions ground my understanding of humanity to a degree that is not otherwise achievable. It is fascinating that those with the smallest horizons can do the most to broaden my horizon. 

Hitchhiking is not for everyone; I wouldn’t prescribe it as a universal medicine. But the fear that keeps most people from ever trying it is not proportional to the world I’ve found. Because ultimately, my defense of hitchhiking is about how easily we accept a manicured life, padded against the idea of the Other. How simple it is to move through our days along calculated paths without ever really colliding with a stranger’s interior world. How this stagnation stifles our growth and resigns us to bins of uniform sameness. How unusual it has become to leave our comfort zones and commit to something so unpredictable and inefficient. How rare it has become to admit you need help and to trust that someone might offer it without a five-star rating attached.

Whenever I step onto the shoulder and extend my arm, I feel a familiar mix of doubt, hope, and giddiness. Somewhere up ahead, someone is already half-deciding to stop. I don’t know who they are yet. I don’t know what we’ll talk about. I just know that for the next few miles, our lives will briefly intersect. For me, that is reason enough to keep hitchhiking.