It is always an interesting time. You didn't say "what kind" of exit, that is important.

In one, people go from owning options in their company which is private to owning options in another company that is also private. In the two companies where I have seen that happen things didn't change a whole lot but the "new way to do things" which is to say the way the acquiring company did things was sufficiently different than the way the acquired company did that there was churn.

In one the "exit" is really sort of an aquihire with no value transferred, rather the employees are all given some form of retention package depending on their perceived necessity to the success of merging in the acquired company. In those, people are typically both happy to still be working and conflicted because they now feel "trapped" as the only way to get value out of their previous investment of time into the startup is by working through their retention.

The rare, but happier version, is the one where stock options become "tradable" at some future date for non-zero amounts of money depending on the current stock price of either the acquiring (and already public) company, or the rarest where the company itself goes public.

A lot here varies by scale. At Sun I watched[1] a number of people become "overnight" multi-millionaires. Some people it didn't change at all, others became insufferable prima donas, and a number basically scaled back their work while they 'rested and vested.' A number of folks left to start their own companies (some as groups like Legato) now that they had enough money to self fund. Some, like John Gilmore, went off to do advocacy because of all the crazy stuff going on in the Crypto wars.

Bottom line is that if its a big uptick in wealth for a number of people they will all respond a bit differently. Life will be different.

For me, I came to recognize that there are many levels of "wealth"

Perhaps the first is when you have enough extra to insure your kids can go to the college of their choice (within reason I suppose). This can empower one to take some riskier bets and reap potentially some bigger rewards.

The next is when you have enough to send your kids to college and you can pay off your mortgage so that your "burn rate" is manageable regardless of your salary. This often empowers people to speak 'truth to power' since they don't really care if their truth makes those in power so uncomfortable they are asked to leave.

The third is when you own your living space outright, your kid's college is taken care of, and you have diversified the surplus into an investment strategy that is kicking off enough returns to cover your nominal burn rate (taxes, insurance, food, gas, car maintenance, home maintenance, etc). I used to talk about as being 'raman rich' much like a startup talks about being 'raman profitable' meaning that you don't have to work but not working means you might not get to take vacations or invest in other interesting endeavors.

So how your life changes will be based on both how you respond and how those around you respond to the way you respond :-).

In the first decade of the 2000's one of those Sun people who had turned into an insufferable prima dona came by looking for a job. They had mistaken (or over estimated) how much of their new wealth was because of what they did and how much of it was just luck. As a result they embarked on a number of risky startup ideas and I suspect never took anyone's advice on solving the hard problems. As a result, a string of failed startups and a trail of people who would listen to their pitch, nod politely and decline to participate. They ended up selling their house, moving to the midwest near their ex-wife's parents so that they could visit with their kids. Not a happy story.

[1] Not me though since I had started on the Monday after they went public.