The sacred and the mundane

Adoption gets argued as though a whole technology were on trial, embraced by the enthusiasts and resisted by the holdouts. Watch what practitioners actually do and the categories dissolve. They are not sorting technologies. They are sorting tasks, and in professions with no shared vocabulary, no shared training, and no shared literature, they keep putting the line in the same place.

Take the clinical psychologists and psychotherapists first. When Anna Felnhofer and colleagues surveyed 694 of them in Austria and published the results in 2025, they found 1.4 percent using therapeutic virtual reality in their practice and 79.5 percent reporting no intention to adopt it at all. This is not a profession that fears software. Its members buy scheduling systems, documentation tools, and billing platforms without a debate, and adopted video sessions at scale when the pandemic forced it, treating the screen as a functional compromise that thins something. The refusal is specific and it is aimed at the encounter itself.

Now take a profession that shares nothing with that one. Barna’s December 2025 survey of 442 American Protestant pastors found only 13 percent not using machine assistance anywhere in their work, with half using it to brainstorm, 41 percent for study preparation, and 24 percent for writing or editing sermons, double the previous year’s figure. The same population reports 65 percent worried that the technology could displace their spiritual guidance, and in a parallel survey of 1,306 church leaders, loss of authenticity in preaching and teaching ranked among the top concerns at 49 percent. High adoption and a hard internal boundary, held simultaneously, by people who do not experience the position as a contradiction.

The third case is the one our own discovery work keeps returning: independent practitioners who automate scheduling, notes, follow-up, and content generation with enthusiasm, and who stop dead at the session. Different field, same shape.

What the refused tasks have in common is not stakes and not difficulty. A misprescribed dose is more consequential than a session, and administrative failure ruins more practices than clinical failure does. The common property is instrumental. In the accepted tasks the relationship is the packaging around a service that could be delivered any number of ways, and in the refused ones the relationship is the instrument that performs the work, so delegating them removes the thing that was doing the work rather than the work surrounding it. That is why the boundary tracks so poorly onto importance and so well onto mechanism.

The word the professions themselves reach for is sacred, and it is worth keeping rather than softening, because no available synonym holds the distinction. Important does not, since the administrative failures are important. Skilled does not, since the drafting takes skill. What sacred marks here is a category of act whose meaning is constituted by who performs it, so that a perfect delegated version is not a cheaper copy but a different thing that has lost its point. A funeral conducted by someone with no relation to the dead is not an efficient funeral. That is the whole content of the word in this argument, and the professions were using it correctly before anyone measured them.

This is a different claim from the accountability one, which says the line holds because a signature cannot transfer. Both are true and they answer different questions. Accountability explains why the human stays legally and structurally; the instrument argument explains why practitioners refuse tasks nobody would ever have held them liable for, like the twenty minutes of silence in the middle of a session.

So the practical move is to stop asking a domain whether it is ready for this technology and start asking which of its tasks run on the relationship. The answer is usually a short list, and everything not on it is fair game, which is a far more generous position than the resistance framing allows. Automate the mundane without apology, defend the short list without embarrassment, and the boundary that hundreds of practitioners drew independently turns out to be a map of where the value went when everything around it got cheap.