Meanly, in
the nineteenth-century, meant to live an ungenerous, miserly, pinched life. It was the opposite
of living fully and generously.
When he says "Still, we live meanly,
like ants," Thoreau means we have become so focused on working and accumulating that we
live narrow, ungenerous lives.
According to Thoreau, what makes our lives
mean or narrow is that we allow too many details to accumulatemost of them worthless. We lose
the essential meaning of life in an endless pile of work and social details and perceived needs,
which divert us from the rich central core of life. Just as a miser accumulates piles of money
he can never enjoy, because he never spends them, so we accumulate work which should free us
after a time for the good life, but instead becomes an end in itself.
Soon
after asserting that most people live meanly like ants, toiling away but not thinking or really
living, Thoreau offers his solution to the problem:
Our
life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has...
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