The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. I'd assume that books were still more expensive back then relative to people's incomes, and they were also the only way to access that content while today you have e-books, PDFs, YouTube-videos or even websites, which are often available for free (not necessarily legally).
On top of that, many literary devices are unrealistic or exaggerated.
Eyeglasses are an interesting case, because there seems to be a causal relationship between being nearsighted and staying inside a lot as a kid, which used to be mostly people who read books or just spend a lot of time on school work. That's less relevant now that kids stay inside to watch TV, play videogames or scroll on their phone, though. Also, many people who need glasses either didn't have the means (e.g. no access to eye doctors, no money for glasses; probably not as important nowadays in most wealthy countries) or choose to not wear them due to vanity, and both of those reasons are kind of orthogonal to adjectives like "intelligent" or "intellectual".
How many people actually collect books for show? That seems uncommon and it should usually be fairly easy to tell for people who are somewhat well-read.
The thing with chess is that it's not fun if you aren't any good at it, and the difference between people who are somewhat good and those who aren't is pretty big. You can get there with pure perseverance (same with most other things that gets listed here, probably), but most people tend to pick hobbies that they don't have a hard time with.
Many ways to end up there. Falling chronically ill is an easy to understand one, even depression can leave you completely unable to get or keep a half-decent job, but many of the better-paying jobs also require some amount of physical fitness. And if you live in the US, any kind of emergency can single-handedly wipe out all of your savings.
Also spending some time in prison might do it, which often happens for bullshit charges. Or just plain old generational economic deprivation - it's a feedback loop!
A lot of online leftists aren't doing anything because they don't know how to do something (or are scared, e.g. of losing their job or of getting brutalized by the police). If you aren't doing anything in The Real World(TM) there are only so many things left to do, and the internet is genuinely terrible about people who make mistakes or change their opinion.
Tolkien also wrote the orcs as pretty explicitly "always evil", at least in lord of the rings and the hobbit. He seemed to be conflicted about making an always-evil race, but that IS how it's written in those books.
Most of today's living elves were already alive back then! By human standards, those times were like the 1990s ... which were actually pretty different times when it comes to political correctness, so fair point actually.
TBH I got it specifically to make chip music, in like 2011. Making music on it is pretty cool actually, but while I did try a couple of games on it it didn't really wow me. Even beyond the outdated technology, I don't really like playing games that don't let you quickload, especially when they're actually kind of hard or generally have a lot of unskippable repetition.
MS Word is essentially a monopoly, but that doesn't mean that every detail of its features is worth copying - quite the opposite, actually. And again, why do you even want to automatically capitalize the first word after a line break that is not a proper sentence stop?
Or why LibreOffice is so stubborn on keeping the menu bar default instead of the ribbon-bar
AFAIK many users, especially those used to the old UI, dislike the ribbon design.
I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.
Why would you even want that? It's dangerous to change written text automatically, a lot of people will be annoyed because they wanted exactly what they wrote. Capitalizing after . or ? makes enough sense to automate it because of grammar rules, but there's no hard-and-fast rule for capitalization after line breaks.
Only console I ever got was the original Game Boy. But I'll definitely upgrade my PC at some point, there's only so many games I actually like and I don't think I'll be content just never playing the next Baldur's Gate 3. I'll have to upgrade my PC anyway at some point just for regular PC things, might as well buy a new GPU, too.
I might consider stopping when there's some new ubiquitous gaming technology that I'm just not into (e.g. I still haven't tried a VR game and I'm not keen on changing that anytime soon).
Eating the entire thing is not generally a requirement for something being edible. You can't eat an entire cow, yet cow meat is considered edible (and if you want to say "but you can freeze a cow and eat it bit by bit", consider an adult blue whale - I don't think one human eats that much meat in a lifetime).
You can absolutely eat rocks, most of them aren't even that bad for you if they're somewhat smooth and not too large. Or just grind it down into a powder and bake it into bread, mix it into a milkshake or make a pill out of it. "healing earth" is a thing (helps with digestion) and it's just clay, you're supposed to either take it as a pill or mix it into water.
I looked up ephedrine, as far as I could tell the side effects were quite heavy compared to caffein or cocaine (though cocaine makes up for it by being very addictive).
The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. I'd assume that books were still more expensive back then relative to people's incomes, and they were also the only way to access that content while today you have e-books, PDFs, YouTube-videos or even websites, which are often available for free (not necessarily legally).
On top of that, many literary devices are unrealistic or exaggerated.