There’s something almost primal about the chorus of Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping. A few simple words, belted out over a driving beat:
I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.
It’s not poetry in the traditional sense, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a declaration. A battle cry. A simple truth about what it means to be human. We fall. We rise. And somehow, we keep going.
The idea behind these lyrics is nothing new. The sentiment they express has been with us for as long as people have faced hardship—which is to say, forever. You can find echoes of it in ancient myths, in scripture, in the words of poets and philosophers. It’s there in the wisdom of the Stoics, in the teachings of every major religion, in the stories passed down through generations. And you’ll find it, too, in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent much of his life writing about the resilience of the human spirit.
The Fall and the Climb
Emerson believed in self-reliance, but not in the shallow, individualistic sense that the phrase often suggests today. He didn’t mean that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps with no help from anyone. What he meant was that life is a process of continuous becoming—of learning, of falling short, of failing, and of beginning again.
In Self-Reliance, he wrote:
“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.”
In other words, we find meaning not in avoiding failure but in throwing ourselves fully into life, knowing that failure is part of the deal. There’s no shame in getting knocked down. The shame is in staying down, in retreating, in refusing to risk failure again.
Life doesn’t move in a straight line, and Emerson knew it. He wrote often about the cyclical nature of existence—the way we progress not in one smooth arc, but in loops and spirals, each setback leading to new insight, each failure making us a little wiser.
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”
This is why, even in our lowest moments, something in us still strains toward the future. It’s why the boxer climbs back into the ring. Why the heartbroken fall in love again. Why the artist picks up the brush after another rejection. It’s not blind optimism—it’s something deeper, more instinctive. It’s the understanding that falling and rising are not separate things, but part of the same movement.
Strength in the Struggle
Resilience is not just an individual trait. It’s something we build together. If there’s one thing that stands out in Tubthumping, it’s the communal nature of the song. This isn’t a solitary figure suffering in silence. It’s a group of people singing, drinking, remembering good times, lifting each other up.
Emerson understood this, too. In The Over-Soul, he wrote:
“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.”
No one rises alone. We draw strength from one another. Resilience is built in kitchens and bars, in shared laughter and quiet encouragement, in the songs we sing to remind ourselves that we are not alone.
The people in Tubthumping are not high-minded philosophers. They are regular people, drinking whiskey and vodka, singing old songs, keeping each other afloat. But that, too, is philosophy. That, too, is wisdom.
The Joy of Getting Back Up
One thing that often gets overlooked about resilience is that it’s not just about endurance. It’s also about joy. The act of getting back up is not just a duty—it’s a kind of celebration.
Emerson, despite his sometimes lofty tone, understood this. In Experience, he wrote:
“The years teach much which the days never know.”
What the years teach, if we’re paying attention, is that the act of persevering is its own reward. There is a kind of defiance in choosing to keep going. There is pleasure in standing back up, in laughing at the absurdity of it all, in taking another step forward even when the road is rough.
And that, perhaps, is why a song as rowdy and ridiculous as Tubthumping has endured. It isn’t just about toughness—it’s about the joy of resilience. It’s about laughing in the face of hardship, about singing even when things are difficult, about the sheer, stubborn pleasure of saying, You’re never gonna keep me down.
Emerson might not have put it exactly that way. But I think he would have understood the sentiment just fine.
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