What can one do? The lyric and the sentiment are themselves quite banal.
Of course its real problem is that it's not banal, but inane; the quality of art is not measured by how many times it's been done. I may still change my mind again about "That's How People..." (my friend's line on it is that it's deliberately "anti-romantic," which I have, at various points, sort of bought) but mostly I find it's not anti-romantic so much as anti-poetry - and once you're coining the phrase "anti-poetry" then where are you? What's the difference between anti-poetry and bad poetry?
(Actually, I know this one: it's "Dear God Please Help Me" vs. "That's How People Grow Up.")
I like your comparison with "by Friday, life has killed me" because it's a fine example of Morrissey actually nailing this aspect of midlife disappointment. Then again, Iperhaps that wasn't what he was going for with "People Grow Up;" perhaps this one was meant to be about epiphany rather than years of wearing-down.
And most of Morrissey's epiphanies can seem banal because, like many artists, his self-reflective inner world is incredibly well-defined but he doesn't seem to get the particulars of "normal" life that well. Thus a quite simple realization like "oh my - so you're telling me people become mature by realizing that their own suffering is only a part of the world's suffering?" comes rather late and sketchily (in the sense that it's an actual sketch). It's valid, but it comes from an unusual system of values and thoughts which understands music and old television much more easily.
(That's the problem with most mainstream Moz criticism - it assumes he's a normal man with an interest in loneliness, old television, music journalism, dead movie stars and the New York Dolls. This isn't true. Morrissey is loneliness, old television, music journalism, dead movie stars and the New York Dolls - a reductive statement, but you know what I mean. His brain's natural channels of thought are extinct popular culture and its own pain and amusement. To say anything about anything larger or more current is a struggle, even if it's one which we've seen him win a number of times, and indeed which he's made one of the major points of his artistic life. All this is a guess, but I think there's at least some truth in what I say.)
The other thing about a realization like "that's how people grow up" is that it's really easy to grasp intellectually but really hard to fully understand, especially if you're a self-reflective thinker, as above. I think the song is an effort to understand. Also, Morrissey is, I think, facing an uphill battle these past few years - "I fear I'll be lonely all my life" is simply easier to express artistically than the impression I've had from his last 20 or 30 lyrics - i.e. "I HAVE been lonely all my life; relationships have failed and I've found that simply growing older is not even a guaranteed route to wisdom." How do you cram that into a metaphor about being seasick?
Ultimately, my opinion of the song still comes down to "fabulous singing, killer hook, obviously painfully heartfelt, not that good goddamn lyric." It's simple, but it isn't "good simple" in the manner of "You Have Killed Me" or "Life is a Pigsty." I firmly believe that a non-fan would find it rather self-indulgent and both obvious and incomprehensable; you have to love Morrissey a bit to see anything in it - of course people said that of Ringleader too, and Ringleader was my first Moz album and made me understand what he was talking about immediately. Perhaps I should just say you ought to be the sort of person who's predisposed to love Morrissey a bit.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's phoned-in - like "Dagenham Dave" and "Christian Dior," it slots into a part of his aesthetic, whatever its other flaws. (He has phoned it in before, but at least the rage and sorrow of "People Grow Up" disqualifies it firmly from that category.)
