As I write these words, time inches ever closer to the start of Week 16 in the National Football League. In the universe of professional football, it’s another critical week of games – games that will play a role in shaping the league’s postseason bracket. 

But in the multiverses of fantasy football? It’s, unequivocally, the week – the only week that’s ever mattered. Every second of action this weekend will represent the relative weight of months – months of preparation, draft-day decisions, trades, waiver wire acquisitions, starts, sits, and so much more. Every ounce you’ve put into this season – the wins, the losses, the points scored – it’s all at once meaningful, and meaningless. You needed every bit of it to get here. And yet once again, the score has been reset to zero – this week, for the last time.

Most weeks, it’s unclear who exactly I am talking to. You, the reader, may be atop your league’s standings; you may be at the bottom. You may have Kyler Murray, Travis Kelce, and Derrick Henry on your fantasy team; you may have Drew Brees, Christian McCaffrey, and Mark Ingram. There’s no way for me to know, and therefore, the fantasy writer’s task of offering narrow advice to a wide audience can often feel a lot like shouting into the night sky.

But if there’s ever a chance I’ll have a correlative understanding of who I’m speaking to, it’s in Week 16. Because if you’re still reading these words, there’s a high likelihood you’re in your fantasy league’s championship game. And for that, I congratulate you: regardless of your league’s size or competitive makeup, you invariably overcame long odds just to make it to this point. My hope is that you feel proud of your accomplishment. But let me ask you this:

Do you feel happy?

A friend of mine – one who I hadn’t spoken with for months – texted me over the weekend. As we got to talking, I scrolled up to rediscover our last conversation, which was in August: a banal exchange of pleasantries that my memory had long since erased. At that moment, I was struck by a blessing (or curse) of technology: its mummification of correspondence. Right now, on your phone, there are dozens of conversations, all frozen in time. Some are from earlier this morning. Some are from March. They sit there, waiting to thaw, waiting to be reopened, each representing a different relationship, a different backstory, a different moment in our lives. We all have that one conversation that’s merely a series of “Happy Birthday!”‘s pinging back and forth through the years with some friend that we’ve grown apart from, that friend we always intend to reconnect with but never get around to doing it. 

The flash-frozen preservation of these digital discussions offers us all the chance to return to a stage in our lives when things were different. Pick a conversation at random, and try to remember what was most important to you at that moment. What were you worried about? What were you looking forward to? What did you hope to accomplish? Time has a way of framing episodes in our lives differently than we expect; often, we’re wrong about how everlasting a setback will be. Often, we predict we’ll be happier with our lives once we hit some plateau. But the fact is we don’t look around enough once we make it to that plateau and investigate if that prediction proved true. 

In August, if I were to have asked you if you would be happy if your fantasy team made the playoffs, you would have likely said: yes. Midway through the season, at a point where injuries or underperforming stars were weighing your squad down, if I had asked you if you would be happy if your team managed to play their way into your league’s semifinals, again, your answer would be resolute: yes. Even in the last week or two, at some precarious moment in a weekend of fantasy football, if I had asked you if you would be happy if your team made it to your league’s championship, again, there would be no daylight between our words: yes. 

Prior to reaching any of those aforementioned levels of success, you would have predicted a sustained level of happiness upon achievement. 

But today, heading into your championship weekend, I’ll ask you once more: do you feel happy? 

Time and time again, we think we’ll be happy once we reach a certain level. A job promotion. A relationship goal. A new house. Some exclusive membership to some exclusive club. But then, something peculiar happens. 

We finally get there. 

We look around. 

We’re satisfied – for a minute. And then it happens.

We recalibrate.

And we say, “I’ll be happy once I …” all over again. 

There’s a term for what I’m describing: psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill, coined by researchers Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. The hedonic treadmill refers to our collective tendency to quickly adjust to some stable level of happiness despite positive – or negative – life changes. In what is, perhaps, the most famous study from this body of work, researchers studied lottery winners and people that experienced a paralyzing accident to determine if their event (winning the lottery, or becoming paralyzed) would forever alter their happiness levels. Remarkably, about six months from the event, the lottery winners reported no sustained increase in happiness from their new financial footholds. And six months after their accidents, the people that had been left paralyzed reported similar levels of happiness from before their accident. 

We tend to believe that there’s some threshold, just out of reach, that represents our bliss; some attainable corner of the world that will grant us eternal satisfaction once we unlock it. And so we spend years climbing some ladder – be it corporate, academic, or relational – in pursuit of what we tirelessly believe will provide the answers to our life’s meaning. But we never stop to reconsider what that ladder is truly leading us to. We never stop to consider why we’re climbing the ladder in the first place. 

Yes, we play fantasy football to win championships – there is no greater feeling in this game than outwitting and outlasting your opponents on your way to the top of the final leaderboard. But regardless of the outcome this weekend, stop and recognize the ways in which you repeatedly recalibrated your own level of happiness or satisfaction with this football season. It’s a season that, in the summer, we merely hoped would happen. It’s a season that, on draft night, you would have been ecstatic to learn that you would ultimately make it to championship week. 

I have friends that told me they’d be happy once they won their first fantasy championship. Now they tell me they’ll be happy once they win two.

Look, there is barely any fantasy league in existence whose championship outcome will materially change someone’s life. Remember that a fantasy football league is only as great as its members make it. If you’re not in your league’s championship game, but are reading these words today, take a minute to unfreeze time: seek out those contenders. Text your friend. Call your cousin. Congratulate them for getting this far. Use it as an excuse to reconnect. 

Because in a year full of regrets, we still have a lot to be thankful for. 

Because we don’t just play to get to the destination. It’s the journey – the months of offseason banter, the draft, the trades, the head-to-head rivalries – that sparks most of our joy. 

Don’t let your current self diminish what your past self worked so hard to achieve.

And never forget that if you’re going to spend all of your life climbing some ladder, you better be certain that you’re climbing the right one. 

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David Giardino is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from David, check out his archive and follow him @davidgiardino.