A lawyer friend of mine cruised through law school at the end of the millennium. He racked up about $30,000 in student loans each year. Oh, yeah -- and he bought a lot of books and CDs. The student loans came due in December, and now he and his new wife are living in her parents' basement. Luckily, he gets along with his in-laws. But still, that wasn't the plan when he took out all those loans.

My friend isn't alone. He isn't even all that unusual. All over the country, young adults are putting off marriage and home buying, waiting to have children and making inadvisable moves such as cashing out 401(k) retirement plans at age 30.

Call them Gen Debt. In the last decade, the average student loan debt for a young household rose 142%, to $15,700, according to the market research company Claritas. More than 460,000 people under age 35 now declare bankruptcy annually, up 20% in a decade, according to a Harvard Law School study. The average credit card debt for this generation has soared from $1,879 in 1998 to $2,748 in 2000. If you're interested, paying that off within a year on a card charging 15% interest would require monthly payments of about $250. Keep in mind that a college-educated Gen Debter typically earns perhaps $36,000, a salary already stretched with payments for housing, the car and that "other stuff."

The upshot? People who thought they had begun adulthood now are taking two steps back for every one forward, especially with the economy taking a nap at the dawning of the 21st century, causing bumptious young consumers to take a hit.

Some of this is just my generation's share of the national spending spree that the '90s boom inspired. But much of the burden is peculiarly Gen Debt's. For most of our lives, we've been the children of flush times. Our parents have never known a depression. Until the new economy crumbled, most of us never imagined getting the pink slips that have become so common. While we were in college, we had trouble imagining a future without jobs. Credit card companies blitzed campuses with generous credit lines. So students cultivated a fashionably casual approach to money. We learned to spend it as if we didn't care much about it. We aspired to live like trust-fund babies, which, for the most of us, is like going bungee-jumping on a hemp rope.

Now, consumer sobriety has set in. But the crushing debt remains, in an age when the expectation of a steady, robust income has been challenged. What's different about today's 20-somethings? With past generations, social mobility always has tugged upward. But for this generation, social mobility moved at warp speed, dragging the imagination -- and the wallet -- well ahead of the middle-income body.

An aristocratic fantasy, cultivated by scriptwriters and marketing campaigns, played out. The cast of TV's Friends, who have taught today's young people so much about being young people, live in spacious Manhattan apartments without enough visible income to keep real people any nearer downtown than Archie Bunker's Queens. Young people are not all lawyers and investment bankers. They're also junior ad executives and rookie accountants. A few big evenings on the credit card each month leave a nasty financial hangover.

Young people don't think of themselves as greedy, let alone crass. They don't particularly want money or things for their own sake. They do, however, very much want to be happy and fulfilled. In the 1960s, those values were paraded as anti-materialist. Those who came of age in the '80s used the "greed is good" mantra to brush aside anti-materialism like a whining beggar.

In the second part of the '90s, the '60s and '80s reconciled. In fact, they got married and begot the anti-materialist materialist, the kid who needs money so he can forget about money and enjoy life. This goes much further than $100 pre-worn jeans and the expensive "simplicity" of Restoration Hardware: It's the widespread belief that, although important things are not about money, you definitely need money to get them.

MasterCard has captured that attitude in its "Priceless" campaign, which lists the expenses leading up to some special personal moment -- a dream date, a graduation, a bicycle tour of the South of France. The best things in life really are free, the message goes, but to reach them you first have to spend a lot of money. Yet you shouldn't worry about that: Just concentrate on those priceless moments.

Enter the aristocratic fantasy. The hallmark of the aristocrat is to be so secure about money that it can fade into the deep background, unmentioned. The aristocrat can afford to cultivate non-materialist values such as public service, personal honor, and the pursuit of beauty and adventure. American culture today is awash in aristocratic images. Look at any Ralph Lauren ad, J. Crew catalog or glossy magazine cover story on princes William and Harry.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the American belief in natural equality made us self-confident -- we didn't have to bow to anyone -- but also uneasy. If everyone is equal, how can we distinguish ourselves? The eternal answer: by displaying our wealth. Debt is the easiest way yet discovered to display wealth -- even if the wealth displayed turns out to belong to Citibank. Using money to pretend that money doesn't matter is a fun game, but in the end it's one that only heirs and heiresses can play. For everyone else, there's debt.