Sobriety has some short-term benefits, but a lot of the benefits are definitely long-term, i.e., they come on over a period of months without you noticing, until one day you wake up, stretch, and say to yourself, "wow, I've come a really long way over the last seven months." It's a little like an overweight guy making big changes in diet and exercise (I was an overweight guy who made big changes in diet and exercise) -- you see some changes in the short term, but you really need to take snapshots and compare from month to month to see progress.
If you're in the short-term gratification mindset, it is hard to get excited about progress that is only apparent over the span of months. Thus I think it's important to work on long-term goals in sobriety (sobriety is the very model of a long-term goal, after all). My life did get better, but not because sobriety was a "magic button" -- it got better because I was working on making it better.
It also helped me to realize that my drinking would likely lead to an early, miserable, lonely death. But again -- long-term view, not short-term view.