Reality or Life

I had a conversation with a co-worker the other day about the following message:

Floating in the empty space of reality.

It sparked a discussion that lasted about an hour and a half we discovered a few things...

We first discussed what reality was, and i got stuck on the fact that reality can't exist were not here. His point of view was some realty is always present even if were here or not.

I tried to come up with some rules for reality to exist. This is what i came up with:
There has to be a world/place where people call home,
There has to be atoms/molecules following rules,
There has to be evolution both mentally and physically of the atoms,

But his point went to the sense of reality always existing whether there is anything present or not. In a way reality sounds like something is always in control of us if it always exists, like someone is analyzing our every move... We touched base on the religious implementations of the discussion but decided not to venture into that realm

We continued to bicker back and forth for a while, before i gradually realized his definition of reality was basically my definition of life.. So i had to define reality as the human definition of life and I brought up the point of virtual realities where we create a create all the rules and understand the system of life that is present.

To counter my way of thinking my co-worker went into art and described life as the black and white phase of life.. Reality as the shades of grey in between, and while they don't exist all the time, they do for short periods of time thus making reality exist for a little while until a problem has a proper resolution...

So in my conclusion if we did not exist then no one would be able to analyze reality and that's life. or is that reality? Is everything all black and white or also grey? Its a conversation i would of liked to have further but we had work to do, and that's just the reality of life.