A smart device can know the house’s routines without understanding what makes it a home.

A device can learn when the lights go on, who comes home, and how the week is shaped, and none of that touches what makes the place a home. The argument that got resolved in the kitchen, the reason one chair is nobody else’s, the significance of a particular evening. Patterns are not meanings.

That gap is worth remembering when data about your life starts feeling like a description of it. Whatever is being measured is a shadow of the thing. Judge your own life by the parts that no sensor is picking up, since that is where nearly all of it is.