The Screwtape Letters (63-104)

In this letter, Screwtape is advising Wormwood on one of the main things we think of demons as doing; temptations. He is telling Wormwood that after awhile, humans do not need temptations to bring them further away from God, they just need guilt of temptations they have already given into.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods[...] so that he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that i spent most of my life in doing neither what i ought nor what i liked". (63)

I think that Lewis is telling his readers to not only avoid doing things that are unclean and unholy, but avoid doing nothing at all. Boredom is a waste of God's creation, and so is spending your life doing meaningless tasks. People should go out there and actually live. I feel that people often are so concerned about not doing the wrong thing, that they end up not doing anything at all, which is sometimes just as bad. Don't spend all of your free time doing the things that bore you, go out and live out your dreams. "Every man dies, not every man really lives" says William Wallace in Braveheart, and i could not agree more, and i would assume that neither would Lewis.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, Inc. 1961