The takeaway from current understandings of the definition of life is that there is no consensus forthcoming in the near future. One concern is that these are summaries of attempts to define a category for which there is only loose agreement. Many scientists disagree as to the phenomena a definition of life is intended to unify. Some scientists would include prions, viruses, and entities only hypothesized to exist in the origin of life, while others would completely reject them. Some might accept digital organisms as alive, others would deny this approach. Conceptual equivocation could have significant costs for research. One field recently quantified this cost, suggesting it is more than a merely theoretical concern (Trombley and Cottenie 2019). Given the diversity described above, one may be tempted to adopt a definitional pluralism: there are many ways to be alive. For some reason, that approach is not common in the literature.