I've grown pretty skeptical of most counterfactual thinking, because it seems to be largely based on a sort of primary cause fallacy. That is, since it's basically impossible to properly construct very complex counterfactuals, in which events proceed according to a realistically convoluted web of indecipherable causality, we instead do it in a naive ceteris paribus sorta thing, in which we change one variable but leave everything else equal, and assume that's good enough.

To get to the point, consider this question:

Your best friend is taking a nap on the floor of your living room. Suddenly, you are faced with a bizarre existential problem: This friend is going to die unless you kick them (as hard as you can) in the rib cage. If you don't kick them while they slumber, they will never wake up. However, you can never explain this to your friend; if you later inform them that you did this to save their life, they will also die from that. So you have to kick a sleeping friend in the ribs, and you can't tell them why.

Since you cannot tell your friend the truth, what excuse will you fabricate to explain this (seemingly inexplicable) attack?

This question requires such a bizarre alteration to reality---in order to construct this scenario, we'd have to imagine an ailment that'll kill someone unless they're kicked in the ribs, and if they are kicked, will kill them if they're informed why---that I honestly can't make heads or tails of it. But if a more rigorous situation were constructed, for example involving blackmail, then it becomes conceivable to avoid the question by outmaneuvering the blackmailer.

Similarly, there's:

Someone builds and optical portal that allows you to see a vision of your own life in the future (it's essentially a crystal ball that shows a randomly selected image of what your life will be like in twenty years). You can only see into this portal for thirty seconds. When you finally peer into the crystal, you see yourself in a living room, two decades older than you are today. You are watching a Canadian football game, and you are extremely happy. You are wearing a CFL jersey. Your chair is surrounded by books and magazines that promote the Canadian Football League, and there are CFL pennants covering your walls. You are alone in the room, but you are gleefully muttering about historical moments in Canadian football history. It becomes clear that---for some unknown reason---you have become obsessed with Canadian football. And this future is static and absolute; no matter what you do, this future will happen. The optical portal is never wrong. This destiny cannot be changed.

The next day, you are flipping through television channels and randomly come across a pre-season CFL game between the Toronto Argonauts and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Knowing your inevitable future, do you now watch it?

Now we're left wondering about temporal mechanics, or what knowing the future actually means. I'm an incompatiablist (i.e., I believe in mesoscale determinism and deny free will), but this question still leaves me wondering about the mechanism for destiny and the apparently paradoxical situation it would present. Does the universe conspire to ensure that destiny is maintained, or are we somehow completely wrong about causality? Again, this prevents me from making headway in understanding the question.

But these aren't interesting thoughts. Pursuing actual insight requires, at the most basic level, at least two things: epistemology and methodology. These questions lack both, so I award them no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.