Life is the whole grunting, sweating, barking, eating, shooting match. If it grunts, sweats, barks, eats or shoots at
something, you can bet your boots it's alive, and you'd be well advised to get your shot in first and eat it.

Living things are quite at liberty to be alive one day and then not alive the next. The transition there-between,
or phase shift if you
like, is known as Death and is generally held, amongst those that quite like being alive, as a bad thing.
Living things that pass death take the label Dead.
¹

For the sake of completeness and to provide you with a warm and reassuring² sense of context
in this panic stricken universe, let the guide show that not everything gets the chance to be alive or dead.
Rocks, for example, are not alive and never have been, nor
are coffee mugs and wristwatches. There is a simple yet crucial distinction here that confers relative
advantages to both living and not living things and it needs further clarification.

To qualify for being alive, you need to have parents, reproduce
³⁴
and die⁵. Rock-like "not alive" things are
not permitted to have sex but they are exempt from death and having parents
⁶.

Rocks, in particular, have a far easier time of it than most living things with their only major worries, erosion,
plate tectonic activity and volcanic perturbation coming either very slowly or very infrequently. Easy as it might be,
though, a rock's existence can be pretty dull. They don't get about very much and, as far as this researcher can tell,
throughout the history of the Universe not a single rock has ever learned a popular dance. This is, of course, why
we say party animal and not party rock⁷.