You can discharge your duties very nicely, but you have to see whether you are developing attachment for Kṛṣṇa. Attachment means love, whether you are trying to satisfy Kṛṣṇa. That is the test. If that is not done, simply formulas, if you execute the formula, as I explained the other day, niyamāgraha, without any satisfaction of Kṛṣṇa, then Sūta Gosvāmī says it is simply laboring and waste of time, viṣvaksena-kathāsu-yaḥ notpādayed ratiṁ yadi, śrama eva hi kevalam.
Then he says, dharmasya hy āpavargasya na artaḥ arthāya upakalpate. Dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa (SB 4.8.41, CC Adi 1.90), these are called āpavarga. Āpavarga means nullifying the pavargas. Pavargas . . . this material world is called pavarga. Pa, pha, ba, bha, ma. According to Sanskrit grammar, there are five vargas: ka varga, ca varga, ta varga, and pa varga. So pa varga, pa means pariśrama.
Similarly, pha means phena, and bha means bhaya, ma means mṛtyu. So this material world is pavarga, means here we have to labor very hard. Sometimes by laboring, as you have seen in animals, bulls and horses, they produce foam in the mouth. That is pha. And then we are always full of anxieties, and at last there is death. This is material life. We work very hard, struggle for . . . struggle hard for existence, and that also, at the end, we die.
So people have become so much foolish that they do not see the defects of the material . . . materialistic way of life. They think only that the time, the small duration of life, if you can somehow or other gratify our senses, that is perfection of life. This is called ignorance, mūḍhaḥ. That is described in the śāstras: sa eva go-kharaḥ (SB 10.84.13). Go-kharaḥ means animals, like cows and asses. This is not life.
So religious life, dharmasya hy āpavargasya. One should become religious or accept religious principle to stop this pavarga, the different kinds of hard struggle for existence. To stop, that is the purpose of dharma. But generally people execute dharma to get some artha. Dharma artha. Artha means some material profit.
So Sūta Gosvāmī said that dharmasya hy āpavargasya na artaḥ arthāya upakalpate. Arthaya, for some material profit, does not mean . . . of course, if you take the meaning of artha as paramārtha, that is required. But material profit, as it is stated here in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam by Sūta Gosvāmī, that to go to the church or to the temple or to become a religious person does not mean that it is meant for improving your material condition.