It is night. A figure in a red cloak, leaning on a staff, walks up toward rocky high ground. In the foreground eight cups are stacked neatly, with a gap in the top row. A moon hangs in the sky, and the figure has turned their back on the cups.
The Eight of Cups is walking away. On paper nothing is missing, but your heart is no longer there. A job with decent pay and fine colleagues that has stopped meaning anything; a relationship with no fights in which you still feel alone. The card shows someone turning their back on that kind of place to go looking for something else. It is not an easy call, and usually part of you knew already.
Reversed, the feet will not move. You know it is time to go and stay out of attachment, or you leave and come back and hurt in the same spot again. In another direction, it can mean leaving before it is actually time, pushed by a mood. Either way, writing down in one line why you are staying and why you are going tends to show which reason is the blurry one.
One thing to check: are you leaving to find something, or just to get out of here?
Many people read this as 'running away after failing.' But the cups in the picture have not fallen over. They are stacked neatly and left behind. This is not leaving because it collapsed; it is leaving because it no longer fills you.
With the Hermit, the leaving heads toward time alone. Next to the Six of Swords it reads as an actual move — a new home, a new job, change your body goes through as well.