Right now I'm listening to the soundtrack of the "tribal love-rock musical" Hair. Premiered off-Broadway in 1967, it's about a group of counterculture friends living in New York and their relationships with each other. All the characters are colourful and odd; there isn't a whole lot of plot; the show was widely criticized for its use of drugs and sexual content. (I've just listened to the song "Hashish," followed by "Sodomy," if that helps to illustrate matters.)

I've enjoyed listening to Hair since my mother first introduced me to it—she remembers when it came out and the sensation that it caused. We often listen to the CD in the car together, singing along loudly with the windows rolled down to anthems like "Aquarius," "Manchester, England" and "Let the Sunshine In," usually while driving through our conservative suburban neighborhood and glorying in our not-quite-so-conservative attitudes. It's something that we've shared together as I've grown to be a disaffected teenager not entirely different from my mother 30 years ago.

I have one particularly vivid memory, though, of my mother, the car and Hair. Once we were driving down one of the busier main roads in town; I think it was "Aquarius" (the first song on the album) that we were listening to. And my mother turned to me with tears in her eyes, and said in a voice choked with anguish, "Emily, where did all the hope and optimism go?" I made some noncommittal remark about how there is still a counterculture today, but my mother was quick to explain that's not what she meant. When she was a student, she said, everyone was filled with an anger at the establishment, but not just one easily relieved by headbanging to music. According to my mom, in the 1960s and 1970s, young people truly thought a better world would be created—and, in fact, was being created. And she said it so fervently, I couldn't possibly have put it down to a misguided sense of nostalgia.

Considering how absolutely uninterested most of the teenagers I know are in the world around them, this shouldn't really have come as a surprise. But we turned down the volume and my mother continued to tell her story, and before long I was getting pretty choked up myself. My mother's not precisely the world's greatest revolutionary. And yet the sit-ins and other such visible acts of rebellion that she and her friends organized at university seemed so alien to me—in fact, not much less so than the engaging fiction of Hair's plot. I felt guilty on behalf of my generation—and, indeed, merely on behalf of myself—for not doing our part to further the notion that a new "Age of Aquarius" was dawning and doing our best to subvert authority. In the end, though, my mother and I were forced to agree that we had no idea what had happened to "young people today."

I still don't have any idea where my generation went wrong. I understand what our problems are: we're consumers motivated by MTV and MySpace, to whom a peace sign or a hairstyle are fashions, not political statements. We don't think, we don't question, we don't even take drugs in an attempt to expand consciousness but rather simply as something to do.

Every time I listen to Hair, I sing along to every lyric, but I yell most vociferously the chants towards the end of the show, where there is tension between a character who chooses to answer his draft notice and the other characters who do not. "Hell no, we won't go!" chant the protesters. "Do not enter the induction centre!" By yelling along I'm desperately trying to compensate for the many times I shut up instead of shouting out, for the times I bought the latest electronic gadget or did something because everyone else was doing it. I'm struggling to reclaim the elusive paradise of my mom's youth, when it was more honourable to be a protester killed by police aggression than it was to be a billionaire businessman.

Yet I have to admit that I would rather accumulate a great deal of money than die an early death, and no doubt if I were to express this sentiment to my peers, they'd laud me for my sensible nature. I'm stuck in an adolescence in 2007, where we all just try to get along and work with the system, not against it. But I listen to Hair and I yearn with all my being to be something different. The dream of a generation grown can still be revived to the tune of "Good Morning Starshine."