Creativity Quote by Robert Smith

The “Internets” does a lot of work here: it’s knowingly clunky, almost a dad-joke plural that undercuts the drama of what he’s admitting. Robert Smith isn’t delivering a tech sermon; he’s letting a casual phrasing smuggle in a darker truth. The web didn’t just amplify opinion. It made opinion ambient, unavoidable, and personalized. Before, criticism arrived as a review, a heckle, a rumor you could choose to chase. Now it arrives as a weather system: always on, always updating, always about you.

Smith’s intent feels less like complaint than diagnosis. A musician who built a career on emotional opacity and cultivated mystique is pointing at the new default setting of modern life: constant mirrored selfhood. The subtext is that awareness isn’t neutral. “More aware” sounds like progress, but it’s really a tax on attention. The internet teaches you to live with your name as a search term, your face as a comment thread, your work as a debate you don’t control. It turns identity into a feedback loop.

Context matters: Smith comes from an era when artists could be misread in private and adored in distance. The Cure’s songs thrive on interiority, on the thick room of feeling where nobody is taking notes. Online culture punctures that room. It doesn’t just invite judgment; it normalizes performing your reaction to judgment. The line lands because it’s understated, almost tossed off - the way you mention a life-changing problem when you’re trying not to sound wounded by it.