रजो रागात्मकं विद्धि तृष्णासङ्गसमुद्भवम्।तन्निबध्नाति कौन्तेय कर्मसङ्गेन देहिनम्॥
rajo rāgātmakaṃ viddhi tṛṣṇā-saṅga-samudbhavamtan nibadhnāti kaunteya karma-saṅgena dehinam
Word by word
The verse says
Know that drive is passionate in nature, born of thirst and attachment. It binds the one who lives in a body, Arjuna, by attachment to action.
In plain words
Tṛṣṇā — thirst. That is the root given.
Not ambition, not energy. Thirst, which is a condition of lack rather than a quality of character.
And the binding is karma-saṅga — attachment to doing. Not to the result. To the doing itself.
Where you've felt this · at work
Your brother-in-law has not taken a full day off in nine years. He says he would be bored, and he is not lying. Something in him has made stopping genuinely unpleasant. The work now holds the unpleasantness off, rather than being the thing he is doing.
Going deeper
Attachment to action itself, as distinct from attachment to results, is the specific trap named here.
Chapter 2 dealt at length with wanting the fruit. This is different and often goes unexamined because it looks like virtue. The person held by rajas is not necessarily chasing a prize; they are unable to be still. Activity has become the medium they are comfortable in, and stopping registers as a kind of threat.
The word tṛṣṇā explains why. Thirst is not a plan. It is an absence that generates motion.
That is worth testing on an ordinary weekend. Not whether you work hard, which tells you nothing, but what the first twenty minutes of having nothing to do feel like. If they are uncomfortable, the discomfort is the subject of this verse, and the work has been managing it rather than expressing anything.