The current delay in the transactions is due to a spammer (attack) on the Bitcoin network, who sends peaks of 150 transactions per seconds on a network that can handle about 7 only.
One jerk can jam up Bitcoin for the entire world?
One jerk with a lot of Bitcoin nodes and a lot of money to burn.
If you just send transactions back and forth to yourself the only money that's burning is the tx fee, and that's minimal.
It can add up to quite a lot, and it isn't sustainable. Eventually the spammer will run out of money.
To be concrete - what is the fee of the spam transactions? If it would be 0.0001 BTC, that would cost in 1 hour with 150 transactions per second
3600 * 150 * 0.0001 = 54 BTC = 14400 USD at current USD rate