I agree, the whole view of life being a binary is kind of silly in my opinion. It’s a continuum from inorganic matter that simply reacts to the environment to self organizing living matter. Living things take input energy and then instead of resolving energy gradients directly as basic chemical reactions do, they channel this energy through metabolic pathways which allows maintaining some internal state. So, in a sense, it’s kind of like a battery which facilitates delayed energy gradient resolution.