Life & Mortality Quote by Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix is talking like someone who’s watched the rulebook get written in real time - by parents, preachers, draft boards, critics, and gatekeepers who swear they’re only being “realistic.” “Supposed to” is the tell: it’s the language of social scheduling, the idea that your body, your love life, even your mortality should follow a sanctioned timeline. He’s not offering a cozy self-help mantra. He’s describing a survival technique for anyone living under constant narration.

The line works because it collapses two supposedly opposite pressures - death and love - into the same category: public property. In the late 1960s, those forces weren’t abstract. Young people were being told when they might die (Vietnam, addiction, violence), while simultaneously being policed for how they loved (race, gender, sexuality, marriage). Hendrix, a Black artist who became a symbol in a white-dominated rock economy, knew that external commentary can sound like fate: you get cast, categorized, consumed.

His repetition of “forget” isn’t ignorance; it’s refusal. It’s a way to reclaim time from other people’s scripts. Even the unfinished ending - “all these things” - feels deliberate, like he’s gesturing at an endless pile of expectations too tedious to list. Coming from an artist whose music often dissolved structure into feedback and flight, the message is consistent: the point isn’t to be reckless. It’s to be ungovernable in the places where society most wants to manage you.