It used to be the case that life was considered as some sort of fluid stuff which was added to the Elements to turn the 'inorganic' material into 'organic' material -- the low-level chemical distinction between 'nonliving' and 'living'. In Latin the life-fluid stuff was called vis vitalis and this view was called Vitalism.
What you are missing is that in 1828 a dude named Friedrich Wöhler took two indisputably 'inorganic' compounds, put them together, heated them up on a stove, let them cool, and got an indisputably 'organic' compound called urea, which disproved vitalism and established that 'organic' is a relatively arbitrary condition having nothing to do with life per se. Today it basically means "It contains carbon in it, and it wasn't one of the carbon-containing substances which were so plentiful in non-living places that vitalists considered them inorganic." The list of exceptions is not too long, but it dates back to this old philosophy. Organic no longer means 'living' because of the disproof of vitalism.
What you are missing is that in 1828 a dude named Friedrich Wöhler took two indisputably 'inorganic' compounds, put them together, heated them up on a stove, let them cool, and got an indisputably 'organic' compound called urea, which disproved vitalism and established that 'organic' is a relatively arbitrary condition having nothing to do with life per se. Today it basically means "It contains carbon in it, and it wasn't one of the carbon-containing substances which were so plentiful in non-living places that vitalists considered them inorganic." The list of exceptions is not too long, but it dates back to this old philosophy. Organic no longer means 'living' because of the disproof of vitalism.
The More You Know.