I'm glad you had fun with this and saw it as a life lesson.

Something similar happened for me, but in reverse.

I was always flabbergasted that folks would think about the universe and then use the term infinity. It made very little sense. But then I figured it out and an old math teacher came to mind when I did.

He said that 1 + 1 = 2 is meaningless unless we turn the numbers into something real. One apple and one apple equals two apples. Now, that is something real, while the equation by itself is not meaningful until applied to something real.

Infinity is not something that belongs to matter; it belongs to space. The spatial universe has no borders. It shows that space is not a something because nothing can be infinite (not even God). That is, except space. Space is real, but it is not a something. It is a phenomenon.

That said, I also realized how the mind can get twisted with 1 + 1 = 2.

We can for instance say that one apple and one orange equals two pieces of fruit. We have the ability to connect two things that are not the same by making them the same, as Einstein said, one level up. This shows again that the actual items are what we need to pay attention to, and the math is the fun part like icing on the cake.