Below is a very not to scale timeline of human history. I've marked periods where body modification is “normal” or “semi-normal” in red, and periods where it's not normal in black. For most of human history, body modification has been a natural part of life. It's only in small pockets of history where it hasn't been very accepted. Here in the West we just finished living through one of those spiritual droughts.
They say that you can see more from farther away; you have perspective. It's why time seems to pass so slowly when you're young and why it flies by as you age. If in the diagram above you look at the complete timeline, you'll see that the norm is mod-friendly culture — but if you look at only a tiny window, you could get the opposite impression.
Anyway.
People always ask me in interviews “when is this trend” or “when is this fad” going to end? What I realized is that we are currently watching the trend end… and the trend isn't body modification. The strange fad, the strange trend, was that period of human history where we didn't mark up our bodies as a normal part of defining our identities.
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