No matter how much I earn, it never feels like enough — I keep moving the number.

Read the verse as a portrait, not an order. Krishna is describing someone who works, earns, succeeds and fails like everyone else — and is not bound by any of it. He gives four marks. The first is the one you need: yadṛcchā-lābha-santuṣṭaḥ (यदृच्छालाभसन्तुष्टः), content with whatever comes of its own accord.

Notice what it does not say. Not content with little. Not content with a fixed amount. Content with what arrives — whatever that turns out to be. The contentment is a property of the person receiving, not of the thing received.

That is the whole diagnosis of the moving number. You have been asking a quantity to do a job only a disposition can do. No sum settles a mind that has not learned to be settled, so the raise lasts a fortnight — because a fortnight is roughly how long the mind takes to resume seeking.

The teachers who have lived with this verse are careful about one thing: yadṛcchā is not passivity, and it is not settling. It is the quieting of the seeking-mind. What arrives is used. What does not arrive is not missed. You can still plan, save and work hard inside that; you simply stop handing your peace to the next figure.

The third mark is vimatsaraḥ (विमत्सरः), free from envy. Krishna sets envy in the middle of a verse about contentment, and that is not an accident.

Ask yourself when the number last moved. It was not when your needs changed. It was when you saw someone else's: the renovation, the promotion post, the car on the neighbour's drive. The line does not move on its own. Comparison moves it. 'Enough' compared to what? While the reference point is another person, enough is a moving target by definition — other people keep moving.

The second and fourth marks close the loop. Dvandvātīta (द्वन्द्वातीत), beyond the pairs of opposites — gain and loss, praise and blame. And samaḥ siddhāv asiddhau, the same in success and in failure. Not indifferent: the same person. Right now you are two people — the one who checks the balance and finds it up, and the one who finds it down — and neither of them is ever at rest.

Be honest about the difficulty. This is a portrait of someone a long way down the road, and the pull of more is not imaginary; it is the water you swim in. You are allowed to argue, as Arjuna did: easy to say when the mortgage is paid. Fair. But look at the last word of the verse. Kṛtvāpi — even while acting. Krishna does not tell this person to stop earning or stop building. The freedom is not from the work. It is from being bound by what the work brings in.

First, find the old number. Write down what you would have called 'enough' five years ago. You have probably passed it. Sit with that for one quiet minute, because it settles the argument: the problem was never the figure.

Second, catch the move. For seven days, every time the target shifts in your head, write down what you had just seen or heard. You will have a short list by Sunday, and almost every entry will be a comparison, not a need.

Third, practise yadṛcchā on something small. A plan that falls through, a bill that comes in under, a gift you did not expect — meet one arrival this week without the instant conversion into 'more or less than I should have had'. Use what comes. Do not grieve what did not.

Fourth, keep working. The Gita is not asking you to quit, to stop saving, or to pretend money does not matter. It is asking you to move 'enough' out of the account and into the person holding it. Then the number can be what it is — and you can be the same person on either side of it.