Lately, I've been watching on-chain transactions, and the more I look, the more I feel that the words "fairness" are quite a luxury.

The MEV practices of front-running and sandwich attacks, to put it plainly, are not just about scamming retail investors once; more often, they turn what should be normal slippage and transaction order into a game of "who is closer to the miner/validator gets to eat first."
You think you're trading with the pool, but in reality, you're competing against a bunch of eyes watching the mempool and reacting...
Thinking about it later, it's quite laughable.

What's more annoying is that it doesn't just affect individual transactions; even project teams doing events, airdrops, or launches can be directly drained of experience by a wave of "queue optimization."
Ordinary users are left just as fuel.
On the macro side, there's also chatter about easing expectations, the dollar index, and risk assets rising and falling together, sometimes up, sometimes down.
When sentiment heats up, on-chain activity gets even more lively, and front-running fees become more daring to increase.

I'm feeling pretty timid now: if I can set a limit price, I do; if I can split into batches, I do; when I see a block with obviously active addresses clustering, I’d rather wait and trade later—no need to hard fight with the "front-running pros."