Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Smith

Smith’s line lands like a shrug that doubles as a manifesto: adulthood isn’t a destination, it’s a surrender. By equating “growing up” with “accepting your limitations,” he flips the usual moral script. Maturity is typically sold as wisdom, self-control, realism. Smith recasts it as capitulation to the smallest version of yourself: the person who stops insisting on weirdness, intensity, or change because the world has handed them a neat set of boundaries and called it “sense.”

The subtext is pure Cure-era resistance. Their music has always treated feeling too much as a kind of defiance, the opposite of the tidy emotional downsizing adulthood demands. When Smith says “we,” he’s not only talking about himself; he’s drafting a community of outsiders who suspect that “grown-up” is often code for compliant. The joke is bleak but pointed: if growing up means accepting the rules as final, then why would anyone committed to art - or to full-spectrum emotion - ever agree to it?

Context matters: Smith came up in a post-punk Britain where sincerity was suspect and institutions felt both brittle and domineering. In that climate, refusing to “grow up” isn’t a Peter Pan fantasy; it’s a strategy for staying porous. The wit is in the framing: limitations are real, but so is the danger of treating them as identity. His refusal isn’t ignorance of constraint. It’s a refusal to let constraint be the last word.