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dont know about how obscure this is, but consider the idea that the true nature of time is that the universe runs like a moving image at a film theatre.
At first, it appears that there is one image that moves, starting at the opening title and ending at the final credits.
This is just as we percieve the universe (including everything within it, such as ourselves) as being a single entity that changes state from past to future.
but in truth, when you get a special backstage peek at the projection room that the movie was being produced from, you see instead that it was many separate images, none of which moved at all, the fluidity of the changes you saw onscreen was an illusion.
Similarly to our universe, it is not one entity that changes state, but many entities fixed in a single state, with each instance being different from the one immediately preceeding it.
the theory is that this is how time truly works, its called eternalism and the model of time is called the block universe, within it is the hypothetical idea of instantism which proposes that everything exists only for this instant.
for how it applies to you personally i reccommend reading about the boltzman brain thought experiment, though in this case its being conjectured that you are a completely different entity at any given momment, constantly being replaced at every interval progressing on the planck scale of time.
additonally, while this idea might at first seem to suggest a fatalistic view of the future and close off any possibility of going back in time, there is the simple matter of further proposing that there are other reels of film beside our own, indeed, that every timeline of universes which could exist within the limitations of our natural constants, does exist, and thus we could travel back in time without paradox due to going back to the past causing us to be seen ceasing to appear in one film reel and being introduced from nowhere in another.
as it pertains to the future being fated, theres the fact that we lack knowledge on what the future ahead of us will be, and the logical certainty that knowing about the future would necessarily prevent that exact future from playing out (since the knowledge constitutes a new variable in the equation that will invariably alter the forseen outcome in some way, away from the future that was prophesied).