मामुपेत्य पुनर्जन्म दुःखालयमशाश्वतम्।नाप्नुवन्ति महात्मानः संसिद्धिं परमां गताः॥
mām upetya punar janma duḥkhālayam aśāśvatamnāpnuvanti mahātmānaḥ sansiddhiṃ paramāṃ gatāḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Having come to me, the great souls who have reached the highest completion are not born again into this impermanent house of sorrow.
In plain words
Duḥkhālayam — house of sorrow. That is what the world is called here, and it should not be softened.
It is a harsh phrase from a book that keeps sending Arjuna back into the world to do his work.
Both things are in the Gita. Neither cancels the other.
Where you've felt this · in failure
Every monsoon for six years your family patched the same corner of the roof. Buckets in the hallway. A tarpaulin. Somebody up a ladder in the rain. Then they had it rebuilt properly. The next monsoon came and nothing happened, and the strange part was how much time everyone suddenly had.
Going deeper
Calling the world a house of sorrow sits badly next to everything this book says about acting well within it, and the disagreement is worth leaving open.
One reading takes the phrase at face value: existence here is unsatisfactory in its nature, and the goal is not to come back. Another reads it more narrowly — what is impermanent cannot hold you up, and the sorrow is in the leaning, not in the world itself.
The text supports both. What it never does is tell Arjuna to leave. Two chapters from now the same speaker will say a leaf and some water offered honestly are enough, which is not the language of somebody who despises the ordinary.
The honest summary is this. The Gita finds something badly wrong with the arrangement, and it still requires you to show up for it. If that feels unresolved, it is unresolved in the book too.