<p>Living organisms are open nonequilibrium systems that sustain ordered structure by exchanging energy and matter with their environment. They do not evade the second law of thermodynamics; rather, they maintain local organization by continuously dissipating free energy while deploying regulatory architectures that store and process information to guide repair, renewal, and adaptive change. In this commentary, we outline a concise thermodynamic–informational framing of the living state, emphasizing (i) entropy production and self-organization in driven systems, (ii) how information-theoretic quantities can be connected to physical dissipation and nonequilibrium irreversibility, and (iii) aging as a progressive erosion of the feedback capacities that stabilize a nonequilibrium steady state. The aim is not a comprehensive review of a large literature, but a focused synthesis that clarifies how dissipation and information-processing constraints jointly shape biological organization, evolution, and decline.</p>