The Pale is a vibe, the creeping understanding of everything that isn't, the realization that being capable of imagination beyond the here and now means, terrifyingly, that we can imagine absence.

We can project our thoughts into the past and the future, into what might be or could have been, into what we want and what we hate. And even once you've built the structures and systems to make ever more distant things "real," even once you can confidently say that the tree does make a sound in the forest even if nobody hears it, there is still a point that is too far, where there's nothing to work with. You can think about what led to how things are now, or where we are headed, but your narrative for it gets simpler the further out you go.

The fact that the pale is encroaching on the real does prompt a lot of things, since in that magical realism style it's like metaphor made material. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's the mental deterioration of age, maybe it's depression. Those holes in reality, maybe they are traumas that made cracks in your Normal, maybe they are where the nukes first struck, maybe they are leaks sprung in our dimension by sci-fi tinkering, maybe they just represent the moment(s) when you first came to understand death.

The church quest is perfect, everything's so drenched in pathos in DE but it reminds you of that great hope of relief from this constant awareness of decay and collapse and deterioration. At da club, or at church, where ever you are carried away by music and dancing and the presence of dazzling lights and most importantly, lots of people with you, somehow it doesn't seem to matter so much. It's like the hole wasn't there at all.

(Also it's worth mentioning the phasmid's line about how it pities humans who don't live at the back of a funnel of reality like it does.)