EDIT: …Well I messed this thread up. I wasn’t referring to biological half life, but sitting-on-your-shelf half life. (i.e. expiry)
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Many things we interact with actually do have a half life. True, the famous ones are radioactive and [biological](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_half-life) (pharmaceutical) half lives, but any reaction (especially chemical) has a half life. They just aren’t important enough for the average person to identify, and they often have enough things changing them (such as stirring speeding up a chemical reaction) that a specific amount is fairly pointless to keep track of.
The reason for half lives is because most reactions are faster when there are more components to react, and they slow down when there’s less components to fuel the reaction. The simplest way to think about this is as if the components have less surface area interacting with each other as they change into something different, so they stop reacting as often.
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