[crdb]

> so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves

That's the part I didn't get from the story. In fact, there was a strong sense of "the future is already written so you might as well not try to get out of it". Life is short so let's just drift along whatever little we have of it passively kind of thing.

I'll keep in mind Chiang's other stories (already bought them long ago) but to be honest there are many books ahead of it on the reading list.

spoilers below

The only positive interpretation I can think of the story is a fairly complex critique of the heroine (and through that human nature) as wanting the safety of knowledge even at great personal cost (25 more years of sadness than she was supposed to have). She did have a choice: she could have forgotten how to read the language and through this regained agency in her own life (or at least hope). This is an example of the cognitive bias of picking suboptimal options because we are familiar with them. She did not pick that choice, although you could argue that knowing she did not pick that choice, she did not pick that choice (return to nihilist square one, the only square).

Asimov's The End of Eternity deals much better with time travel and information about future timelines. IMHO.