यया तु धर्मकामार्थान् धृत्या धारयतेऽर्जुन।प्रसङ्गेन फलाकाङ्क्षी धृतिः सा पार्थ राजसी॥
yayā tu dharma-kāmārthān dhṛtyā dhārayate ‘rjunaprasaṅgena phalākāṅkṣī dhṛtiḥ sā pārtha rājasī
Word by word
The verse says
The steadiness by which you hold on to duty, pleasure and gain, Arjuna, clinging as you go, wanting the fruit of each: that steadiness is driven.
In plain words
The second kind, and what it holds on to is a familiar list.
Duty, pleasure, and gain. The three ordinary goals of a respectable life, and there is nothing wrong with any of them.
What makes this the middle kind is not the goals. It is prasaṅgena - holding them while clinging, with an eye on what each one yields.
Where you've felt this · with money
Suresh keeps three things going at once. A job he is good at, a family he is present for, and a small business on the side. He does all three properly. He also cannot sit through a meal without his mind going to one of the other two. He has not had an evening in four years where everything was allowed to be fine.
Going deeper
Holding good things tightly is the failure here, and it is the most respectable failure in the chapter.
Nothing on the list is a vice. Duty, pleasure and gain are the ordinary business of a life and the tradition names them as legitimate. The verse does not ask you to drop them. It observes what happens when the holding is tight: the three things stop being a life and become three accounts to be kept in credit.
The strain is familiar to anybody who has run more than one serious commitment. The problem is rarely the hours. It is that each one is being monitored for return, so none of them is ever simply happening.
What this points at is not doing less. It is the difference between carrying three things and gripping them, which costs nothing in time and almost everything in attention.