While my personal taste plays into this, I also think that, stepping outside myself, this fails to work as a surrealist piece for two reasons:

1) It is deceptive at the start.

2) It does not follow-through at the end.

Here is my reasoning behind Point 1: Obviously, the piece is meant to be confusing and to be uninterpretable until read to completion. I understand that — my rebuttal to this is that the roads that the beginning takes are not clear even on a reread. In a piece that ends with some mild logicism and technobabble about how it got to this place, I fail to see how the beginning is relevant. Is it meant to be the thought process of someone who has been abstracted?

In that case, I think it doesn't nearly become abstract enough; its language is literal, and the only difficulty in parsing it is cancelling out some of the double negatives it's wrapped in. The reward you get, in this case, also doesn't feel satisfying — the philosophy is second-rate, and the metaphysical discussions are quite basic for people who are supposed to have been in this state for a longer while, centering solely around the semantics and conceptualization of ideas like "meaning", "life," and objective time . I would have appreciated more alien thought processes and more difficult, relativistic viewpoints.

Still, I mean it's deceptive because all of this discussion is thrown out for a more concrete, solid way of looking at things. It made me feel cheated when I realized that all of the indirect language that I've described earlier was really a way to cushion the inner workings of an article that does not actually step into surrealism or absurdism — instead, it dips its toe in it, and retracts it at the end by giving an obvious and concrete explanation as to what you've just read. I personally did not like this explainer, and I think the piece would have been better if left more open to interpretation.

The second point is simpler: I think it was too simple. The ending, for all of the language, is, objectively, the discovery of a base and a lone world that's disappeared itself/themself from perception by messing with the flow of continuums and timelines. While this could be expanded on, it isn't, and the technical jargon that explains it feels flat in this context because it's used to cover up for authorial intent. Under the premise given, I don't see how it's possible that the human mind could even conceptualize of the reality of this idea: if we take it that the logic behind the Grandfather's paradox is what drives the contours, then it follows that the existence of the contours must be hidden, because contemplating these contours would require going back in time and being able to compare what was different then, when the effects of the disappear-ee were clear, and your present time. While I understand that it's explained in the article as "people can recognize when something in their lives is lost and the universe isn't perfect at filling holes in human memory", I don't personally buy it — to me, the best explanation for all of it is that the author simply willed the universe to work that way to give a clear, concrete story.

For a piece that takes surrealist elements as its framing, I find discarding it mid-way to be cheap. That's