You seem really upset that the definition of life is not settled. Please calm down and try to understand why this is so.
It is not difficult to determine that an entity is the offspring of a living thing. DNA and RNA are giveaways. It is also not difficult to determine that an individual that used to metabolize has ceased to metabolize. (Except for viruses, which never did, and spores, which have suspended metabolism.) So except for the trillions of bacteria that are able to to suspend animation and reanimate under more favorable conditions, it is fairly easy to distinguish living from dead.
But if there is a chain of chemical evolution leading to life, and if we can reconstruct it (or one of the possible chains), it will be difficult to determine which step is uniquely the first living entity.
Without that history, or a plausibly reconstructed history, we don't really know how easy or difficult it is to define life.
Truly, I am not upset that we have been unable to arrive at a broad consensus of "in nature, what is life?"
It is the smoke-bomb assertion of the fallacy of quantizing the continuum which has me in the mood to lob it right back at 'ya. If it is a fallacy, it applies everywhere.
And, btw, I disagree with your requirement to know origin or intent in order to define life v non-life/death. But that is a subject for the Plato thread.
It's easy to define life; the only thing we see defying the 2nd Law, NOT tending down toward equilibrium.