This is functionally a case of affirming the consequent or something similar. “Ball is life” is really expressing something more like “there is no life worth living except one involving ball”, so “fuck it we ball” is needed to keep living a worthwhile life if you assume that, but it’s not really an endorsement of living itself.
It’s like how, if I believe “drinking is the only reason I live”, saying “I want to drink” only endorses “I want to live” incidentally at best, rather than the two statements being equivalent. It’s like, in a mundane context, saying you want to eat. Eating is a condition of living, but the desire to eat is not identical to the desire to live, and a suicidal person can still be hungry and eat not to live but merely to relieve the pain of hunger. So too can the alcoholic lifestylist drink and the baller ball for the sake of their enjoyment of the respective activity (or aversion to how they feel without it) without there being a direct desire to live as such.
Sure, Im just familiar with those two from maybe 20 years prior. When I first heard it used to refer to bball or athletics in general, first thing that came to my mind was cocaine use, injecting is pretty intense I hear. I knew a guy but never have have tried myself.
