"THE CESSPIT OF SELF PROMOTION"

About being self-employed and navigating social media

VISION DURING HIBERNATION, painting by the author

I wrote the draft version of this essay in January 2025, to follow on from a previous post about social media titled:

GOING VIRAL (is when the trolls come out!)

Every once in while, a comment on social media catches my eye and stays with me. Recently it was someone exclaiming (in a general post, this comment was not in any way directed at me personally) on Facebook that she was sick of the way Facebook has become a cesspit of both advertisements and self-promotion. All these people endlessly trying to sell me their services or products!! She said that she frequently considers leaving Facebook altogether. And by all means, that is her prerogative. (And she may well have done so by now).

As a side note: do you notice how we now need to make a distinction between friends and “Facebook friends”?

However, there are two things that irk me about her post:

In 2018, when a very large number of people became outraged at the notion of paying for Facebook and insisted that Facebook has always been free and should remain free forever, Mark Zuckerberg promised to deliver this. BUT as they say: if you are not paying for a service, you are the product (or commodity), not the customer!

Maintaining a SPRAWLING site like Facebook, on behalf of (by now almost) the entire world population, obviously costs money and human admin hours (though more and more bots seem to get involved!) So what is actually happening is that Facebook has become a data-farming site, run by algorithms. Facebook is indeed not the friendly and supportive environment it pretends to be!

I was in Vietnam recently and the local people I met there had Facebook accounts and most (small, local) restaurants had a QR Code (Follow us on Instagram! Or: “Leave a review on Instagram!”) on the menu. So Facebook is not only “a Western phenomenon”.

Revisiting this draft essay about six months later I will add that there has since been a huge exodus from all Meta Platforms, in protest to the values those platforms represent and how they are run. At the time I wrote a post titled: THE “META PLATFORM EXODUS” but my own perception of things has shifted since (as this post will show).

To my Dutch mind, this woman expressed a sentiment felt by many people. BUT her comment is like saying: “I want to pay very little tax but I also want the Government to make significant investments in the National Health Care system (in the UK everyone is entitled to tax-funded medical care), Education and state provision for children (and adults) with disabilities. So, which one is it that you want? You can’t have both! There is no mysterious pot of money sitting somewhere, at the end of a rainbow, that will endlessly fund public services.

In the UK we could choose to “go Swedish” (very high taxation but also a very, by comparison, impressive social care system) or we can lower taxes (plunging weaker groups in society into dire straits). I am aware that in the US, for instance, it is not uncommon for people to spend their life’s savings on dementia care for their parents, which potentially (if those parents live long enough) leaves some people with no provision for their own old age. We also hear about people being laid off and living in a broken car, that sort of thing. We Western Europeans tend to take our “safety net” for granted. We recoil at the notion of someone being refused medical care because they do not have insurance or can’t afford to pay for essential treatment.

WHERE THE STARS WHISTLE TO THE SHAMAN, painting by the author inspired by an Inuit belief

However, what hits me even harder is the “Cesspit of Self-promotion” comment. On Facebook (but far more so on YouTube, in my opinion), there is some very high quality content, put out by people (for free) hoping to put some attention on their professional services. If we were really to forbid all and any form of self-promotion, that content would disappear. The people sharing content (of a high or even professional level quality) would then also disappear from our feeds, unless they are “retired people engaged in altruistic community education”.

On YouTube most long-form high quality content (some of it shot in professional studios with a team of professional film makers etc.) is funded by commercials by the way. This is a different (funding) model, called “monetization” but it is still advertising! Someone needs to pick up the bill so we pay with our time and attention. The “price” of access is usually three long commercials (sometimes six or more) during one hour of listening to an amazing interview or specialist lecture).

For about 15 years, I typed in a daily sacred art post on Facebook. I often did this even at weekends (with an occasional day off). My posts never said “this piece of art is for sale” and I never mentioned a price either. People would send me an email or DM and ask: Is still available? What is the price please? - I consider that a very soft sell! And I have had galleries (who combed through my entire website) contact me, complaining that I sell my work for way too little money. Apparently I need to double or triple the prices, to be in line with “the art world”. I choose not to do this. I want my work to be affordable for ordinary people. Call me stupid, perhaps I am down-grading my own artwork? (Please let me know in the comments!)

This year I have gradually moved away from this well-established professional habit. I no longer start my day by typing in a sacred art post. This has freed up time in my schedule and it also has felt “freeing” on other levels.

Most people perceived my sacred art posts more as a free “inspiring art appearing in your feed kind of public service”. Some people said that they always visited my FB page first thing in the morning. And that is fine! Their feedback often sparked off ideas for future paintings and drawings and I would ask for permission to keep the nicest comments on file as endorsements. Their “likes” bumped the post up the feed, I was grateful for that too. (I once heard someone call this “algorithmic endorsements”, this is certainly one good way of supporting people whose work you value!)

A publicist I once worked with told me a golden rule: 1/5! This means: for every post that promotes an item people can buy (a painting, a course, a ticket for an event etc.) you must run four “non-promo posts” - or people will scroll past or even unfollow or unfriend you. No one likes posts by people who only try to “hard” sell things but never comment on other people’s posts and never post free content either! (And indeed, I admit that I immediately scroll past those types of posts myself, even if I know those people in person and if I quite like them in real life).

Daily life (wherever I am in the world) throws up plenty of material for such “non-promo posts”. Hilarious things my children say, brilliant questions my students or readers ask, people I meet on the streets of London, animals I encounter in the forests in Sweden or whatever! In previous blogs I have already explained that I sincerely wish to maintain a connection with key people on social media sites. I genuinely care about them and I say prayers when people ask for prayers. I am a real, living and breathing, human being, not someone relentlessly promoting herself. (But I also have a non-digital life!)

At the moment I am running (near) daily posts about Life as a Forest Witch. All this requires is sharing footage that I have on my phone anyway, because I am a compulsive “snapper”. I have no specialist equipment at all, but I love taking photographs and short videos (most recently of stumbling upon a wild boar sow and her four babies resting in high grass). IG LINK FOR VIDEO

BUT, like many other people, I am also self-employed and I do sometimes need to bring my professional work to people’s attention. So if social media were to impose a total ban on “self-promotion in any way or form”, as the lady who inspired this post appears to wish, there would be little incentive for me to write thoughtful and uplifting posts about forest witch life, sacred art and spirituality. The same thing would be true for many other people, who offer a valuable service in the local or global community.

If this lady got her wish, she would definitely see less self-promotion in her feed but in reality most of the high quality material would also drop out of her feed overnight! People, like myself, would presumably move to other platforms or options to showcase their work. After all we do need to make a living and that is not a crime!

By means of a reality bite, let me add that Facebook and Instagram have been steadily moving into a direction of de-valuing all posts with any self-promotion “flavour or feature”. For instance the system messes up any links you post, so the wrong page shows or the wrong picture, which makes a post unattractive or misleading. Instead they want people (with any kind of product or business) to opt for paid promotion.

And people who have tried the paid promotion option (based on the promise that your post will reach a much larger audience) appear to have disappointing experiences with it. (I cannot speak from personal experience here). The general direction of travel is definitely that these platforms make money from their users on a free plan (that is you and me, if you have any social media account) and they also try to make money from people promoting their goods or services. That makes those sites increasingly unwelcoming and rather aggressive. It also proves that there is no such thing as a “free lunch” (or “free” social media platform).

Oh and while I am on this topic, their algorithms also create echo-chambers, setting users up for a rude shock when, one nasty day, they discover that in reality many people hold opinions diametrically opposed to theirs. As a Dutch Dinosaur in my 50s I believe that deliberately making people lose touch with reality is harmful and dangerous. This fact of modern life alone should make us re-evaluate the instruments that shape our perception! (This topic deserves an essay in its own right).

IN THE MISTS OF TIME, painting by the author

On reflection I would not mind paying a monthly fee, if those platforms then delivered what they are meant to do, free of ads and dystopian algorithms. And if they were staffed by humans (not bots) who kept an eye on things, and stepped in when true mishaps or genuine violations occurred. Many of us now get regular warnings about “having violated community standards” when we haven’t, but a bot has misinterpreted a post. In January 2024 I ran one Facebook post where I did some rune work around the theme of rebirth, using a small baby doll. Next thing I knew Facebook contacted me about “child trafficking offences” and I was banned for a few weeks. And I am not alone, this is now a normal part of the social media landscape (while real child traffickers use the internet and social media platforms freely to commit ever more heinous acts).

Conclusion: there is no free lunch! The complaints I see daily (such as the lady who kindly gave me an idea for this essay) often seem a bit childish to me. Like children whining that their parents aren’t the perfect parents because they don’t prioritise their needs over all other concerns 24/7 (after all the parents also need to earn a living, shop and clean, pay utility bills, provide care for ailing grandparents and occasionally take a breather!)

And tragically, not absolutely all parents have their children’s best interests at heart. However, that is neither here nor there. Social media moguls are not our parents and why would they provide (and fund/staff) a free service year after year? Almost inevitably they are turning all of us into commodities (rather than valued customers, as they like to pretend). I would say: think that through and then set your level of engagement, or withdrawal, accordingly.

Right now I do not feel inclined to resume the writing of daily sacred art posts any time soon. Instead I write an occasional long-form sacred art post here on Substack instead.

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes several), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). All artwork shown in Substack posts is my own, unless credited differently! If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda, Forest House, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.

Website:                           

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

YouTube Channel:             youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook:                            https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram:                          https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/