We can discuss philosophy until the cows come home, but from the point of view of physics, what living organisms do best and appear to be evolved to do is to increase entropy at a high rate. For example, in order for photosynthesis to work high-energy (visible light) photons are required. Much of that energy is stored in sugar molecules. Some of that energy is lost as low-temperature (waste) heat as well as in the plant's own cellular respiration (as heat again). Animals eat molecules containing a high chemical energy content per unit of mass and excrete molecules containing a lower chemical energy content per unit of mass. When animals go about their business maintaining their body temperature and making more copies of themselves, they emit low-temperature thermal radiation, a.k.a. waste heat, a form of energy mostly escaping from the atmosphere into space and powering nothing.
There are complex structures made up of biomass in the Earth's biosphere that have a lot of chemical energy stored in them. Apparently those molecules are more efficient at dissipating solar radiation as waste heat when organized into living beings rather than lying about disorganized. That was the conclusion of Jeremy England, an American physicist at MIT whose attempt at explaining why life exists in the first place is based on statistical physics. It is a real problem to explain to how the first self-copying structures emerged and what they were because there is virtually nothing left of them. But if England's hypothesis is correct, then the emergence of pre-life isn't as extraordinary as one can easily imagine.