"don't try to jump straight across that river, you miss and it sends you to the hospital", "don't submit that edit to the wikipedia page for Butterfly, it makes cyclone Julia in 2028 much worse", "don't make that toasted cheese sandwich or the sun explodes", honestly, i'd really like some encouragement once in a while. maybe if they could send someone back to tell me that i really should sign up for that course, or go to that social event, or persevere with learning an artistic medium, or whatever. i understand that the time bureau has limited resources and it's sensible to allocate them to preventing serious injury, natural disasters, and world-ending events, and i know it's a big privledge to get visited by them at all, but when you're repeatedly made aware of the fact that the entire future rests on your shoulders (as it does for everyone whether it's made clear to them or not) only when you're about to make mistakes, it becomes pretty tiring.
actually i should clarify on the "serious injury" thing because it's probably not obvious why they go back for that and it's admittedly a reason why i shouldn't be complaining. it's a bit complicated: part of it is that the cause and effect for one person getting badly hurt is often pretty obvious. you make a bad move or end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and directly as a result of this you get hurt. contrast this to much bigger disasters: suspension bridges collapsing, war breaking out, celestial bodies exploding. "if you make this toasted cheese sandwich, the sun explodes" makes it sound like the sandwich is the sole and direct cause of the explosion, but this isn't the case: it's just one thing which, if changed, prevents the disaster. finding these potential causes takes a lot of compute time on some very very expensive time-travel-aware servers. the causes of injuries can be reckoned by hand, so they can send someone back to prevent them without running a full cause-for-effect job, even though they still need to fill out a lot of paperwork and use a lot of energy to do the time travel itself.
the second thing is that they obviously can't do this for every injury that occurs to everybody, or even a significant fraction of them, there just (ironically) isn't enough time. almost always they go back to people who are already acquainted with time travel because they're the ones getting told not to do things in order to prevent huge disasters. this is generally accepted to be for a mix of two reasons: one, that it's beneficial to limit direct exposure to evidence of time travel to as few people as possible. this is also why it's always the same people apparently causing bad things to happen - it's not that they're comehow more cosmically accident-prone, just that the searches for possible causes of events being up a lot of points where things can be prevented, and the time bureau likes to visit people who are already in the loop whenever possible.
the second reason is that, beyond just being something the time travellers do when they're bored waiting for their more important assignments to get calculated, preventing personally catastrophic incidents is the time bureau's unique sort of thanks for those who have to put up with their visits about matters of grave importance. they always have more options if somebody decides they care more about their lunch than the sun exploding, but it's easier if those in the past cooperate. occasionally getting to skip sustaining a big injury is a great perk, i'll admit, i just wish they could be more creative in their offerings.
i might have gotten some of the details on this wrong; much of it is rumour because the time bureau doesn't publish details of their internal working. this is more or less what i've heard from other people who get visited a lot and the occasional time traveller i can convince to answer my questions, though.
