Almost all efforts to search for signs of life are limited to our galaxy alone which is only ~53,000 light years across. So at most, the light we're seeing from our galaxy is only ~ 40,000 light years away and thus reflects what was happening 40,000 years ago. Since the universe is roughly 13.7 Billion years old, 0-40,000 years ago all should be roughly "now" on an evolutionary time scale. You're right that when we look at the furthest objects we can see we're looking back billions of years in time, but those objects are so far away we won't have any hope of getting information about planets and their atmospheres or hearing radio signals they might transmit so that's not where we have the ability to look now.