It's hard to explain without sounding like some hopeless hippy, the only way I can explain it is that they just feel right to some people, for example the tribes in africa, have never been on myspace, but have very large stretched ear/lip piercings for some deeper reasons and everything is cool. Other cultures use the act of piercing the skin as some sort of cleansing experience, some people just get pierced temporarily, perhaps there is something that happens on a primal level when you modify your body that you can relate to on a spiritual level, I'm fairly interested in the psychology behind non western piercing as it ties in to a lot of their religious beliefs, but that's a tangent for another day. That's not to say that having piercings purely for looks is a bad thing, but you end up with a lot of people who made bad decisions and jumped on bandwagons giving it a bit of a bad name, leading people to make negative associations. As for boxes, Kierkegaard said it right