I don't know if my instructor declared the well-known fact to mitigate the apathetic, graduating-senior attitudes of some of my classmates or to get the rest of us to care about the grade we got in his class.

But I did know that I'd heard the sentence one too many times.

For the umpteenth time in the past two, maybe three years, someone told me that my generation would be the first to earn less than its parents. But instead of swallowing the buzz-fact alarm of slackerdom whole, I narrowed my eyes at my professor, then scoured the mint-green cinderblock walls for a window to daydream out of.

I was sick of being berated by the media, parents, teachers and yuppie-bound peers for so-called apathy over and over again. But instead of staying awake at night trying to figure out how to reverse the statistic, I thought about how silly the threat actually was.

First of all, the statement implies that we'll be less successful than our parents' generation. Sometimes "less successful" and "make less money" are interchangeable, as those who are older and wiser attempt to scare us into motivation with two versions of the same statement.

But what really gives the figure its punch is the connection that we're supposed to make between money, success and happiness. Those who advocate the threat make the assumption that each generation should fill a consecutively higher quota of Range Rovers, Jacuzzis and big-screen TVs.

So, hypothetically, if your parents had a two-car garage, it is assumed that you should want to work 70 hours a week so that you can have a four-car garage.

The people who spew the phrase know that there is no way of measuring happiness, because each man's definition is different. So they slap the interchangeable "money" and "success" on a well-researched and well-funded little fact and hope to snap us out of our pop culture-generated stupor. The big meanie baby boomers had to invent some catch phrase with which we could inherit their work ethics, Protestant and otherwise.

Those same workaholic baby boomers funded overpopulation conferences, where they discuss birth control proliferation and educating Third World parents out of their "ignorance."

But maybe if we put a limit on brainwashing twentysomethings into excessive materialism and consumerism, there would be more room for children and less room for malls of America and their adjoining parking lots. Then maybe we'd be allowed to have the children to fill our nine-bedroom, five-bathroom houses.

Somewhere in Middle America a group of employees leave huge empty houses behind every morning and go to work at a very important, 20th century-specific corporation. The corporation records the name of each generation and tabulates their vital statistics -- favorite band, average income, suicide rate, a few quips from the voices of the time.

I'm not sure if the employees wear lab coats or business suits, but I do know they are worried that some of us don't remember where we were when the Challenger exploded or when the Berlin Wall came down.

Maybe the corporation's statistics figurer who wasted his or her time originating the "less-money-than-your-parents" statement is scared that our generation will clog humanity's logical rites of passage. Perhaps "Generation X" will be the first to remain in the phase of wild abandon instead of passing, with the appropriate dose of struggle, into the phase of blind ambition.

I suppose that for every generation, there's a Gap to be filled. We pour the sportiest new models of cars, the quirky fly-by-night fads and the self-mocking, ironic books into that gap, hoping to pack the void so that we cannot fall into it.

So I will make less money than my parents. I look at the standards that have been set up for me -- the swimming pools, BMWs and laptop computers I should, by social nature, desire.

But even though my generation may be destroying the logical progression of man's material toys, I'm not worried. I don't feel reality biting at my heels, graduation doesn't scare me and living above my parents' two-car garage won't turn me into a Generation X cliche.