> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hereactually.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Guy Who Leaves at Six - URL: https://hereactually.com/essays/the-guy-who-leaves-at-six/ - Published: 2026-10-04T06:30:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T06:30:54.000Z - Description: A man packing his bag at six shouldn't be able to ruin twenty minutes of your evening. If he can, the problem probably isn't his bag. - Author: Lakshay Virmani - Tags: Shadow Work, Projection, Carl Jung, Osho, Alan Watts, Psychology, Philosophy Before you read anything else, do one thing for me. Think of a person who gets on your nerves. Not someone who hurt you. Someone who just irritates you. The colleague. The cousin. That one guy in the group chat. The person whose name pops up on your phone and your jaw does a little thing. Got them? Now give me three words for what bugs you about them. Quick, and don't be polite about it. Show-off. Fake. Clingy. Lazy. Loud. Whatever comes first. Keep those three words somewhere. We're coming back for them, and by then I think they'll mean something a little different. --- Mine, for about fifteen years, was one word. Lazy. There was always someone. In college it was the guy who skipped the 8 a.m. lecture, borrowed my notes the night before the exam, and passed anyway, grinning. At my first job it was the colleague who logged off at six sharp. Every single day. Chai at four, laptop shut at six, never once stressed, never once sorry. I'd watch him leave while I was on my third pull request of the evening, and something hot and sour would climb up my chest. I had a whole speech for him. Mostly in my head. Sometimes in the shower. *"Bhai, deadline kal hai aur tu chaiii pe hai?"* It was a good speech. Fair, I thought. Very reasonable. What I never asked was why a man packing his bag at six could ruin twenty minutes of my evening. He wasn't doing anything to me. He was going home. ## The bear is back In 1987, a psychologist named Daniel Wegner asked people not to think about a white bear for five minutes. Every time the bear showed up anyway, they had to ring a bell. The bells rang more than once a minute. Push a thought away and it comes back louder. (Regular readers, you've met this bear.) Ten years later, three other psychologists asked a nastier question. What happens when the thing you're pushing away isn't a bear? What if it's a part of you? They took a list of traits nobody wants to have. Selfish. Rude. Arrogant. Dishonest. Lazy. They found out which ones each person most hated the idea of having. Then they watched how those people judged everyone else. The people working hardest to deny a trait in themselves were the quickest to spot it in others. Show them a stranger doing something you could read two ways, and they'd pick the reading that matched their own banned word. And when the researchers told people to push away thoughts about a bad trait in themselves, those people were more likely to see that trait in the next person they judged. Lazy was on the list. Of course it was. The bear doesn't stay in your head. It walks out and sits on other people. ## The dark part of the stage Long before that lab, a Swiss psychiatrist named Carl Jung had a name for this. Jung spent his life listening to people's dreams and fears, and he noticed that everyone carries a part of themselves they refuse to look at. He called it the shadow. In his words, it's "the thing he has no wish to be." The part of you that you'd rather not be. Here's how I picture it. Your mind is a stage, and you're holding the spotlight. Whatever the light falls on, you see. Everything else is still on the stage, just sitting in the dark. Growing up, you learned that some things on that stage got you clapped for, and some got you in trouble. Being clever: clap. Topping the class: clap. Crying in front of relatives, showing off, asking for too much, being loud at dinner, lying around doing nothing on a Sunday: not so much. So you did what every kid does. You didn't delete those parts. You can't. You just stopped pointing the light at them. They're still up there, just out of the light. Then someone walks into your life doing that exact thing, in full light, without apologising. It's like someone switching on a torch in the one corner you've spent years not looking at. That sudden glare is the irritation. Jung put it in a single line, in a book about his life that he worked on near the end of it: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." He was writing about seeing his own country more clearly from far away. It works just as well on the guy who leaves at six. Here's my dark corner. Until Class 8, I was a chill kid. Seventy percent without trying, no ambitions worth naming. Then I tackled the class topper in a PT-period football match, and from the ground he told me to show that attitude in class instead, where I was nothing. After that day, I decided that kid was the problem, and I spent fifteen years making sure nobody, including me, ever saw him again. He didn't go anywhere. He went into the dark. And every time someone walked past me looking like him, relaxed and unbothered and leaving at six, he lit up, and I called it lazy. I wasn't angry at my colleague. I was angry at the part of me that wanted to go home too. ## Before you blame everything on yourself A fair warning, because this idea is easy to overdo. Not every irritation is a mirror. Some people are rude because they're rude. Some colleagues really are lazy, and the whole team pays for it. If someone hurts you, that isn't your shadow. That's them. The giveaway, I've found, is size. Is your reaction bigger than their crime? Does it stay with you long after they've left the room? Do you have a speech? If a man packing his bag can take twenty minutes of your evening, the problem probably isn't his bag. Run your three words past that test now, quietly. Which of the three has a speech? And look carefully at what the mirror shows, because it's often not what you are. It's what you weren't allowed to be. My mirror never said "you're secretly lazy." I'm not, really. It said "you haven't let yourself rest since Class 8." That's a different sentence, and it stings in a very particular way. ## The gold in the dark Here's the part most of the internet leaves out of Jung. The shadow isn't only the ugly stuff. He was clear about this. Next to the things we're ashamed of, it holds good things that got pushed off the stage with them. He listed some: gut instincts, honest reactions, clear thinking, the urge to make things. When the chill kid went into the dark, he took his laziness with him, sure. He also took his sense of humour, his ability to rest, and the way he used to enjoy a Sunday. Which means the mirror works the other way too. The people you can't stop admiring are showing you something that's yours. For me, that was three men. They all found me in the same year, a year I took off work in New York after fifteen years of sprinting, when I finally sat still long enough to look around. Alan Watts gave me play. He talked about death and God the way a friend tells a good story at dinner. Osho gave me permission to lighten up. His idea of meditation included shouting and jumping. And Jung gave me the dark. At the height of his career, he let himself fall apart and spent years writing down his strangest dreams and visions in a big red book. He later called it the most important time of his life. Play. Lightness. Going into the dark on purpose. All three were doing, in public, exactly what the topper in me had banned. No wonder I couldn't stop listening. I listened so much that I started signing off my own Instagram captions with *"that's enough gyaan from Virmani baba for the day."* Self-appointed. Zero disciples. Several very patient friends. There's a harder part here, and I'm not going to skip it. These men were not the perfect people you see on quote cards. In 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, Jung published an article claiming that "Aryan" minds (the Nazis' word for their supposed master race) had more potential than Jewish minds. It was the same racial language the Nazis were using. He never publicly took it back. Watts wrote more beautifully than almost anyone about being fully present. In his last years he drank heavily, and he died at fifty-eight. In 1984, the people running the town Osho's followers had built in Oregon, USA, put salmonella, a food-poisoning bacteria, in the salad bars of a nearby town to keep its voters home on election day. Seven hundred and fifty-one people fell sick. Osho blamed his secretary once she had fled, and she went to prison for it. For years I handled all this the easy way. I kept what I liked from these men and threw away the rest. I still mostly do. But the mirror works on heroes too. When I looked at them, I saw the gold and nothing else, because the gold was what I was missing. The men were whole, and messy. The halo was mine. I'm the one who put it there. Maybe that's what heroes are for. Not to follow. To show you what's sitting in your own dark, waiting for you to come and get it. ## Everyone is doing this to everyone Once you see this, other people get a lot more interesting. Because if it's happening in you, it's happening in them. The aunty who can't stand how much your cousin travels. The boss who loses it every time someone takes a sick day. The friend who calls everyone fake. Each of them might think they're looking out of a window when they're really looking into a mirror. That includes whoever is irritated by you. When someone's reaction to you is way bigger than anything you did, maybe you've wandered into the dark corner of their stage, the part they won't look at. It doesn't make them right. It might make them less of a villain. Seen this way, a family WhatsApp group is just a dozen people lighting up each other's dark corners on a schedule. Good morning flowers included. ## Your three words Go and get your three words. Now try them on yourself. Not as an accusation. As a question. Where in my life is this not allowed? Who taught me that? What would happen if I let myself be a little bit of this? You might get an answer straight away. You might get nothing. Sometimes a show-off is just a show-off. You'll know by how it feels when you ask. Then, if you've got one more minute, flip it. Think of someone you admire a little too much. What do they have that you were told you couldn't? You don't have to fix anything tonight. Jung wasn't selling a fix. One does not become enlightened, he wrote, "by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." In plain words: you don't get wiser by staring at the bright, pretty stuff. You get wiser by looking at what's sitting in the dark. That's the whole job for now. Swing the spotlight into the dark corner and have a look at who's sitting there. These days, some evenings, I leave at six too. The chill kid says hi. The person who annoys you isn't blocking your light. They're standing exactly where you never point it. --- *Subscribe below if you haven't. And hit reply with your three words. I'll tell you if they used to be mine.*