When there's traffic, I can't help but stare at the mempool, watching my transaction as if I'm waiting in line at the cafeteria: first accepted by nodes, then put into the local candidate pool, miners/validators are actually more like "picking orders," prioritizing those with higher fees first, the rest keep broadcasting and getting pushed down, and in the end, either get included in a block or timeout/replaced. The feeling is that the more urgent you are, the more likely you are to be tortured by your own accelerated fee...

Recently, some people have also complained that on-chain data tools and tagging systems are lagging or even misleading. I resonate with this: during congestion, the "who's buying and who's selling" seen on-chain is often a post-hoc interpretation. The actual queue jumping, order cancellations, and resubmissions happening in the mempool are often invisible on many external dashboards.

As for the "long term," I now prefer to think in quarterly terms, at least enough to review the costs and mindset from several traffic jams. Otherwise, looking at it weekly can easily make me overreact. Anyway, I admit: I get anxious too, but anxious as I am, I won't go overboard by blindly adding fees to send money.