Ideas — Maria Yen

This is where I think out loud:

Humanness
The condition of being permeable to a world that's real. The capacity to be affected by beauty and by loss, to need other people as witnesses, to stay present at the edge of what you know.

Permeability
Staying open to what's real, even when it costs something. Grief moves through you, beauty catches you off guard. It's the opposite of the armor most systems ask us to wear.

Infrastructure
The systems a society builds to hold up the things it decided are important. Hospitals for sickness. Schools for learning. Roads for getting places. Nothing like this exists yet for humanness.

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A Hundred Questions: Why I am building infrastructure for humanness to flourish.

A reflection on building infrastructure for humanness to flourish in a world increasingly organized around productivity, measurement, and AI. The Humanness Project explores how we might make visible, and consequential, the qualities of life that systems struggle to see: presence, meaning, reciprocity, care, and human value.

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Humanness • August 24, 2026

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Bookshelf

I discovered this book thirteen years ago, just as I was beginning palliative care research. Gawande turns his surgeon’s lens on modern medicine, asking what we optimize for when survival is no longer the only question.

What stayed with me were the real patients and families, and the small, deeply human things they wanted at the end of life: being home, sharing a meal, having time with the people they loved. Things no chart could capture.

It gave me an early glimpse of an idea that has stayed with me ever since: the most important thing happening in a room is often the thing the system has no way to record.

This was my first real introduction to design philosophy, and it opened my mind to entirely new ways of thinking. Escobar argues that the West has convinced itself there is one real world, with everything else reduced to culture layered on top—the “One-World World.” Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It’s the assumption underneath many systems I spent twenty years working within: one definition of value, one definition of productivity, applied everywhere as if it were neutral. What stayed with me most is the idea of the pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit, each with its own way of knowing what matters. My work is about creating conditions for many definitions of human value to exist—and matter.

Early in my PhD, before I had a clear research question, someone put this book in front of me. One sentence changed everything: “What is each person able to do and to be?” That question helped me find my own.

Nussbaum distinguishes between a capability and a functioning. A capability is the real freedom to do something; a functioning is whether you actually do it. Someone fasting and someone starving may look identical, but only one has a choice. That distinction is close to what my research is trying to make visible.

His idea of a threshold—the minimum every person is owed—has become central to my thinking about human value.

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