"Well. There's two things - there's the reason why most of us don't want it, which has principally to do with loss of face and losing touch with friends and the general acknowledgement by the other haut that this one was a failure and is being demoted. And there's the reason why I don't want it, which is that from the perspective of my extremely unusual goals it would, impressively enough, be a step down. I want to do constructive work. I do not want to play status games and write poetry - though I have nothing against poetry, I do have something against status games - and while I live here and have the privilege of my bubble, my only problems are having a low supply of friends and serious obstacles sharing any of my ideas with people who would use them in broader contexts than miniscule art contests. I don't suffer from lack of materials or education or spare time.

"Assuming I don't find some way to evade the fate before I'm perhaps thirty - maybe younger, I am unusually blatantly an unsuccessful haut-project - then I will abruptly find myself short on all of those things and likely accompanied by co-wives with every reason to despise me. A haut-wife's principal tasks are to design children with dramatically fewer resources than she might have hoped to have for the task - because she can only work with her personal genome and her husband's - and to be ornamental. And these tasks are somewhat harder to dodge than any given use of my time on offer in the Celestial Garden, so even if I selected avenues of work that didn't require materials I didn't have, I'd have less time to do it in. To say nothing of the fact that I have not met any ghem-lords who seemed like pleasing company in their own rights."