I beg your pardon! If it's almost impossible to define "life," then you can't get hung up on how "life" began, because you have already admitted you don't know what "life" means.
Incidentally, I think I could do a pretty good job articulating why your examples aren't "alive," but I also think that, given the present state of technology, you could make a virus particle from scratch and it would work, and there are some things even more complex than viruses (that is, even deeper into the gray area of life) that could also be made from scratch. A person today, no, but things that some people consider are "alive," today, yes.
Make a single celled organism that is alive, and since you can articulate why my examples aren't alive, articulate why yours is.
And there is still a huge debate over whether virusews are alive.