Acharya Prashant urges a deeper look into the nature of most modern-day jobs, considering the significant portion of life spent in them, typically eight to ten hours a day. He questions whether people truly understand what their job is doing to their inner selves, emphasizing that this is not a small matter. While we profess to be clever and are proud of our arithmetic, we often fail to calculate the total cost associated with serving a job. We focus on the paycheck, which is an easily processable number, but neglect to honestly calculate how much we are losing by being in that job. The speaker points out that while a salary figure is a number that can be easily accounted for and put on an Excel sheet as a gain, there are other factors that are not as easily monetizable. He asks if something that is not easily monetizable does not exist. He gives examples of these hidden costs, such as suppressed emotions. He states that most people are in jobs that don't truly pay them; rather, they pay a lot to be in those jobs. The net take-away from such jobs is often highly negative, which makes a mockery of our supposed cleverness. It may ostensibly appear that one is taking home a certain amount, for example, one lakh rupees per month. However, the reality might be that one is actually paying their organization two lakhs every month from their own pocket by being in that job. If one earns one lakh, but it costs three lakhs to earn that one lakh, the monthly take-away is a loss. What one truly takes home is depression, anxiety, ulcers, and a wasted life. The speaker points out the irony in loving figures like 'take-home' and 'CTC' (Cost to Company) but failing to calculate the 'CTM' (Cost to Me). We are people of numbers, and if something is not easily convertible to a number, we feel it doesn't exist at all. If one's life turns loveless by serving a particular job, one doesn't even want to factor in that lovelessness because commerce and accounting books do not teach how to convert it into a number. We don't know the cost of that lovelessness, so we dismiss it as an intangible. The story of our lives is that we expect the right things, like understanding and love, to happen in the wrong places—places designed to be ruthless, loveless, and soulless. The problem is that these places are central to our lives, where we spend three-quarters of our waking hours.