Energy in physics feels analogous to money in economics. Is a manmade medium of exchange used for convenience. It is the exchange medium between measureable physical states/things.
Is energy is real in the same way money is? An incredibly useful accounting trick that is used so frequently it feels fundamental, but really it’s just a mathmatical convenience?
Small aside: From this perspective ‘conservatipn of energy’ is a redundant statement. Of course energy must be conserved or else the equations are wrong. The definition of energy is it’s conservation.
Things move and collide. Systems arrange themselves into patterns and come undone through disorder. The words we use to describe natural action exist indepenently of action itself. Momentum, symmetry, order, chaos, calculation. The words and definitions are made up, the phenomenon we attempt to encapsulate and abstractly represent is not.
The concept of energy is connected to its counterparts, the flow of physical mass and the abstract information contained within the flow or guiding it.
The various ways things act and paths followed to undergo change are what we attempt to understand through the theorems of math and symbolic physical laws of the universe. They are behind the fundamental layer-cake that is our reality.
Encoded in the patterns of a swinging pendulum, the electron cloud vibrating around atoms, the wavelength quanta and redshifting of photons, the nuclear fusion and fission of elements in stars.
Biological process of plant cell chloroplast, photon solar energy, carbon and water to churn sugar and protien. Dynamics of all living things based on complex calculative statistics relating food, resources, population size, and death rate.
Electrical whizzing of neurons that make up the computations of biological minds. Lakes of water floating above head forming the convection cycle. Virtual particles that pop into and out of existence in the smallest scales of existence at high fractions the speed of light.
Immense gravitational waves that emminate from two black holes merging their topologies. Infinitesimal gravitational pulls that relate you to the sun moon, planets, every comet, speck of dust, everything in the observable universe.
These are all real observable things that exist whether or not we attempt to describe or sense them. Energy and information are everywhere because they make up everything.