The Catholic Shame of being a Tax Professional Using AI

There is a specific kind of shame that attaches itself to anything that works too well. Not moral shame exactly, more the nagging suspicion that if something made your life easier, you probably did not deserve the result. Religions continue to build on centuries of infrastructure on this idea. Some of us absorbed it more thoroughly than others. A tax partner who hands everything to a junior and walks into the client meeting to present the output does not lose a moment of sleep over this arrangement. It is called leverage. It is how the profession works. That same partner quietly using AI to do the same thing at 11pm will not be mentioning it at the next team offsite. Different tool, same output, entirely different feeling about it. We have been here before. When spreadsheet software arrived, there were people in accounting firms who felt something shift. The columnar pad crowd did not go quietly. Hours spent on manual reconciliations had meant something. Competence was legible, visible in the effort. A machine that did it in seconds was not obviously a promotion. Then there was online dating. For a solid decade, if you met your partner on the internet, you had a cover story ready. You met at a work thing. You had a mutual friend. The actual answer, that you filled out a profile and an algorithm matched you, felt like an admission of some kind of failure. Failure at what exactly was never quite clear. Being normal, maybe. Now it is just how people meet. The shame dissolved the moment everyone was doing it. Ozempic is the current version. The judgment is almost aesthetic at this point. You did not suffer enough, you took a shortcut, the weight you lost does not fully count. People who would never say this about blood pressure medication say it freely about a drug that works. The through-line is not technology. It is the idea that suffering is the proof of legitimacy. That if the tool made it easier, something was lost in the transaction. There is something very particular about this feeling, very particular to certain cultures and certain professional classes, where effort became so load-bearing that the output stopped mattering as much as the struggle to produce it. AI did not invent this problem. It just arrived next in the queue.