Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

This guy:

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.

Ah yes!
Cleric Maria Rainer of the Tetragrammaton.

Is there name for this? If so, what is this called? There has to be some kind of psychology behind all of this.

Liminality? The same liminal as in liminal space.

One definition is:
of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition: in-between, transitional

I think pop culture references to liminal spaces have caused the term to be conflated with creepy in recent parlance. But liminal is not synonymous with creepy. It describes a transitional period between two states. Like standing in the threshold between rooms.

Your descriptions seem consistent with this: E.g., when you talk about the car ride with your mother—that moment where the car was parked in the driveway, the radio silent, and maybe just the stirrings of the engine cooling down and errant drips from the compressor was the liminal space between your journey home, and whatever your routine was once you were home, whether it was homework or a snack or something else.

I’m 22, and I’ve been getting this throughout my entire life

Lucky you! I’ve only experienced it a handful of times: most memorable at a rooftop shrine in a busy city, but in a quieter part of the city. And also at a large garden in the same city that happened to be quiet, i.e., not busy, at the time.

I don’t think quiet is a prerequisite though. I felt a similar sensation in airports when I was younger, even with the noise of all the people moving about. What made airports liminal for me was the realization that, in mere hours, all of us in the airport would all take different flights and be scattered across the world, and how fleeting it could all be.

If you’re only 22, then if you’re attending college, graduation might be another big one where you’ll get to experience the same sensation. Well, that moment after the ceremonies and dinner with the parents. You’ll have maybe a week or two where you move away from campus, and you’ll just be in this liminal state waiting to start a new job or grad school or whatever the next chapter of your life is.