One must wonder how the scholar and novelist, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), could foresee modern culture and the inevitable consequences of a mind flickering from one digital screen to another, consumed with worthless distractions.

In his classic book, The Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942, Lewis’s senior demon, Screwtape, advises his apprentice devil, Wormwood, on how to keep his patient away from the Enemy (God).  In Letter XII, Screwtape observes:

“…you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.  As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.”

Screwtape points out their demonic goal is for their “patient” not to realize until he arrives “down here” that he spent most of his life “doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

Screwtape emphasizes to Wormwood not to underestimate the power of Nothing to separate man from the Enemy (God).

“The Christian describes the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’ Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”

Screwtape reminds his apprentice that “the safest road to hell is the gradual one.” 

Could it be that modern man follows the gradual road by embracing any distraction that keeps us from thinking about what is true, good, and right?  By turning our eyes away from the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we are distracted from our calling and instead, drive down a path of cynicism and nihilism, seeking gratification in feeble curiosities. 

And then, feeling empty and unfulfilled, we wonder why life seems so meaningless.