Human Experience - SECOND EDITION

Jill Shem traces the distance between the tools humans build and the human needs they fail to meet.

Drawing on lived experience as a Third Culture Kid, software developer, and self-described humanitarian, she moves through memoir, cultural criticism, and conceptual framework-building to examine how labels — for people, for health, for objects, for identity — divide where they could connect.

She proposes the Human Abstract and a Social Progress Hierarchy of Needs as alternatives: build for what we all share, not for the highlight reel.

At its core, HUMAN Experience is a book about kapwa — the Filipino value of shared humanity — and what it would look like if that value shaped the systems we design and the communities we build.

Because in the end, we're all just humans on thin ice.