The art of making history boring

Why was history class so mind-numbingly dull in school? Given the countless masterpieces of historical fiction in novels and films, it’s almost a “craftsman-like feat” to make the subject that tedious. I say this with a touch of irony, but as someone who holds a teaching license and spent a brief time in the classroom, I understand that this dullness is structural, not personal.

Everything is geared toward university entrance exams. To feed students information efficiently, history is stripped of its soul and reduced to “symbols”—years, names, and cold facts. But as the saying goes, “Fools learn from experience, while the wise learn from history.” The real point of history isn’t memorizing symbols; it’s observing the human drama behind the facts to make better choices for the future. I speak quite boldly like this for someone who took one look at the grueling working conditions of teachers and sprinted in the opposite direction, but recently I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which made me realize another way to enjoy learning history.

The superpower of talking about nothing

Harari’s book is a psychological thriller about our species. The central mystery is this: How did Homo sapiens, who were physically weaker than Neanderthals, end up ruling the planet? The answer was our ability to communicate through shared fictions.

A Neanderthal could communicate facts: “Look! A lion!” But only a Sapiens could say, “The lion is our tribal spirit.” By believing in things that don’t physically exist—gods, nations, or “brands”—thousands of strangers can work together. Neanderthals were stuck in the “real” world. We conquered it because we could imagine things that weren’t there yet.

CAD data vs. the designer’s ghost

This evolutionary trait is the “hidden engine” at CondeHouse. When a designer brings us a new proposal, they aren’t just handing us a blueprint. They are handing us a piece of fiction—a mental image of “comfort” that doesn’t yet exist.

We have the latest CAD data, but numerical data is just a “symbol,” much like those dates in a history textbook. To turn that symbol into a masterpiece, our craftsmen and designers have to talk, talk, and talk. We have to share the “ghost” of the chair that exists only in the designer’s mind.

I often joke that even a Neanderthal, given the right tools, could build a decent replica of an existing chair. But they could never invent an original one. Originality requires the “Sapiens superpower”: the ability to see the non-existent and convince others to help you build it. We don’t just manufacture wood; we give physical form to shared imagination. Every time you sit in one of our chairs, you are literally sitting on a 70,000-year-old evolutionary advantage.

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If you need proof of the Sapiens’ ability to believe in “fictions,” look no further than the Hatsune Miku Art Chair. Miku herself is a digital fiction—a collection of pixels—yet she has inspired a global community. By merging this modern myth with the physical reality of Hokkaido woodworking, we are performing a ritual as old as our species: turning a shared imagination into a tangible legacy. It’s a chair built from a dream, designed for those who know that the most powerful things in life are the ones you can’t see, but can definitely feel. After all, if we only sat on what was “real,” we’d still be sitting on the floor like Neanderthals.

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