I’m reminded of a quote I can’t find again and I’m paraphrasing and butchering- every generation sees the previous one as primitive troglodytes and the future one as effete dandies.
It's incredibly hard to argue against even with the tools of history on your side. We are psychological pre disposed at any point in time to consider that the present moment relative to that time is the utmost most important and urgent and also to view the past and future as less important. It's non stop urgency of the moment.
Imagine a historian in the future writing about the decade we are living in now and just writing a line "nothing much to note". We would feel insulted and hurt just considering this.
More realistically: The most important time yet.
And this is kind of reasonable, since progress mostly seems to accelerate.
People intuitively discount the future, since it's hard to imagine what will come. But I haven't seen many people actively discount the future.
Folks who talk about any sort of arc to history have to be thinking of a fundamentally statistical reality. The lived experience of any specific human or tribe is going to be far too nuanced for that picture.
Perhaps?
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."