Pay the fee.
(right now, with 18,517 tx in wait, the 100% possibility for next block inclusion is 0,0005 BTC which is $0,341, versus the "usual" $0,0682).
Use an intelligent wallet, scanning the average fee atm, and no hold up. I have never been delayed, all my transactions went through to the first possible block. All this mempool backlog is an unnecessary FUD, anyone who pays the actual required fee gets in the first block.
Sure, for now it works. But how long until the fee gets really high? Basically the fee will rise until a sufficient amount of people get squeezed out because the fee is getting too painful for them to be using bitcoin. High net worth individuals and businesses doing international transactions won't have a problem with this, so certainly bitcoin will keep on being used for a long time. But I get irritated when I read this 'sack up and pay the damn fee whiners, everything is fine attitude' (not necessarily yours to that degree, but certain members of the community have this stance). There is not a reasonable fee to be paid whereby everyone's transaction will go through, the amount of transactions are limited. I really appreciate all the work Core is doing for scaling, and I think that maintaining (or in fact archieving) a significant degree of decentralization is paramount. However, I get irritated when people act like there is no problem, and that paying 10 bucks per transaction in the future is fine. So what, is bitcoin only meant for the 1% and the techies and libertarians who jumped on board quick enough to be wealthy now? The rest can have their savings eroded by central banks ? I hope bitcoin scales as quickly as technologically possible (especially hoping for LN to become reality quickly).