They warned me about a lot of things when I started setting up smart home automations--security issues, buggy updates, the weirdly addictive nature of putting sensors on everything--but one thing nobody warned me about was how it's destroying my belief in our ability to know anything about the world.

I have five separate devices in my apartment that sense temperature, four in roughly the same location (as far as I know; I'm not actually sure where the heat pump's thermostat is, but I'd think it's on the controls, right?), and they give five different temperature readings, sometimes as different as 5°. None of these readings seem to be consistent with my experience of the temperature, even taking into account things like breeze, HVAC vs fresh air, etc.

Which of these is right? Are any of them right? Which ones matter the most? Are they fine actually but I'm hitting menopause? Does it even matter, if I'm uncomfortable? (Verdict is yes, because the whole idea of this was that I shouldn't have to be adjusting it every ten minutes.) Is the cat a reliable indicator of the actual temperature? (Almost certainly not.)

Obviously you can have these issues any time you wind up with multiple tools doing the same thing, but I feel like focusing so much on tiny changes in order to create automations has made it so much worse. 72° is too warm--but wait, is that 72° by the sensor at the balcony door (much colder than the rest of the apartment, but it's where my desk is) or 72° by the sensor in the hallway (central, but again, not where I'm actually sitting). And wait, those are different models of sensors, if I put them next to each other do they read the same?...not always! It feels like the universe is messing with me and I don't like it.

Regardless, objectively speaking, it is difficult to maintain fine grained temperature control in a two-bedroom apartment with a single heat pump in the living room (but also baseboard heat under most windows).