When the mempool is congested, it really feels like watching a line for bubble tea... The transaction you send first turns into a "ticket," bouncing around between a bunch of nodes, entering their respective candidate pools, waiting for miners/packagers to pick.

If the fee is too low, it doesn't fail immediately; it just gets stuck, cut in line by others, or even you raise the fee again (replace) to bump the previous one, making it feel like "I clearly placed an order but no one calls my number."
What's more annoying is that if one transaction from the same wallet gets stuck in front, the ones behind it get dragged along—on-chain, it's not "parallel processing" as you might think.
Recently, there's been talk about social mining, attention as mining... Honestly, during congestion, attention really is valuable: who keeps a close eye, who’s willing to pay more, whether they might mistake a fake contract with the same name—these differences show up.
But that’s about as far as it goes—don’t idolize it.
Forget the grand narrative for now; I’ll just keep watching those strange transactions in the queue.