Maybe not in the moment, but afterward.
I heard football great Deion Sanders talk about this once. He said one of his lowest points was the night after a Super Bowl win.
I remember winning the Super Bowl that year, and that night after the game I was the first one out of the locker room, the first one to the press conference, and the first one to go home. And I remember my wife, Carolyn, saying to me, “Baby, you just won the Super Bowl! Don’t you have a party downstairs or something to go to?” And I just said, “Nah,” and rolled over and went to sleep. That was the same week I bought myself a brand new $275,000 Lamborghini, and I haven’t even driven a mile before I realized, “No, that’s not it. That’s not what I’m looking for. It’s got to be something else, I’m so hungry.
The party might be amazing and go on for days, but when it ends, what do you have left?
Something to live for, I hope.
Meaning is in relationships, not fleeting pleasures, if you want to know the truth.
Ditka later spoke of the sense of anticlimax that washed over him almost before the game was over—it was like coming off a mountain. You wake the next morning happy but sad and empty and without purpose. “Peggy Lee sang a great song, ‘Is that all there is?’” Ditka said. “And it really felt that way. The game can never match what they build it up to be.”
-Rich Cohen, Monsters