ये हि संस्पर्शजा भोगा दुःखयोनय एव ते।आद्यन्तवन्तः कौन्तेय न तेषु रमते बुधः॥
ye hi sansparśa-jā bhogā duḥkha-yonaya eva teādyantavantaḥ kaunteya na teṣu ramate budhaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
The enjoyments born of contact are wombs of suffering. They have a beginning and an end, Arjuna. The wise do not take their delight in them.
In plain words
A hard sentence, and the hardest word is in the middle.
Duḥkha-yonayaḥ — wombs of suffering. Not followed by suffering. Producing it.
And then the reason, which is gentler than the image: they start and they stop.
Where you've felt this · with money
The new phone is genuinely better, and the pleasure of it lasts about nine days. You know this already, because the last one did exactly the same thing. You will probably do it again anyway.
Going deeper
The claim is not that pleasure is wicked, and reading it that way makes the Gita into something it is not.
Ādy-antavantaḥ — having a beginning and an end. That is the whole complaint, and it is structural rather than moral. A thing that starts will stop, and a happiness built on it inherits the shape.
So the suffering is not a punishment attached to enjoyment. It is the far end of the same object, arriving on schedule.
What makes the verse land is that everybody already knows this and it changes almost nothing. You can be entirely clear that the pleasure will fade and buy the thing anyway. Knowing the shape does not dissolve the pull.
Which is why the Gita does not stop at this diagnosis. The next verse turns from what is true about pleasure to what can actually be done in the moment it arrives, and that is a much more practical sentence.