Is Watchtower Preparing For More Investigations and Losses?

Jehovah's Witnesses have just published a new whiteboard video on jw.org aimed at teenagers, called "Plan for the Future." It tells young Witnesses to build good qualities like industriousness, find a job to support themselves, and think about the kind of reputation and friends they want to have. To anyone who has never been a Jehovah's Witness, it sounds harmless. To anyone raised in the religion, it sounds like a complete reversal.

That's because Watchtower's own internal literature — the material meant only for people already inside the religion — has spent decades telling young Witnesses the opposite: don't plan for a career, because the world is ending too soon for it to matter. Comparing what the public video says with what the internal magazines and letters to elders say, often within months of each other, shows two very different messages aimed at two very different audiences.

What the New Video Actually Says

The video runs a little over three minutes. It opens by comparing life to a vacation that flies by faster than you expect, then tells teens to plan now for their future "before time gets away from you." It suggests going to God for wisdom, and adds a line worth remembering:

You can probably think about several things you would like to do in the future and you might get a lot of suggestions. no matter what others say. Remember, the things you choose to focus on now will have an impact on your future.

The video never says whose suggestions are the wrong ones. It talks about avoiding "the problems that come from taking a wrong course" without ever naming that course, and it advises against spending time with people who "wander aimlessly through life" — coded language, to anyone raised in the religion, for what Watchtower calls "bad association," which in practice means anyone who isn't a Jehovah's Witness.

The rest of the video encourages viewers to be industrious, honest, and dependable, to acquire the skills and training needed to find a job and "support yourself and possibly a family one day," and to treat others with kindness so they can build good relationships "both at home and at work." It closes with the line: "It will be here sooner than you think."

What's notable is everything the video leaves out. In three and a half minutes of advice to young Witnesses, there's no mention of the last days, this system of things, Armageddon, the Paradise earth, pioneering, or the Kingdom Hall — none of the staples that normally define a Jehovah's Witness upbringing. The future being planned for is a job, a reputation, and a family, with no suggestion that the world might not last long enough for any of it.

Fifty Years of Telling Kids Not to Plan for a Future

That omission stands out because Watchtower has spent over 50 years teaching the opposite: that young Witnesses should not plan for a future in this world because the end is too close. The clearest statement of that position comes from the Awake! magazine of May 22, 1969, in an article addressed directly to teenagers:

If you are a young person, you also need to face the fact that you will never grow old in this present system of things. And then therefore, as a young person, you will never fulfill any career that this system offers. If you were in high school and thinking about a college education, it means at least four, perhaps even six or eight more years to graduate into a specialized career. But where will this system of things be by that time? It will be well on the way toward his finish, if not actually gone.

The teenagers who read that in 1969 are in their 70s now. The advice given to them wasn't to pursue an education but to learn a trade like carpentry or plumbing, which would supposedly be useful for reconstruction work after Armageddon. That advice was tied to the organization's strong hints that the end was coming in 1975 — which it didn't. A second failed prediction followed in 1995, when the teaching that the generation alive in 1914 would live to see the end of the world collapsed as that generation died off.

Despite both failures, the same kind of instruction kept appearing. A letter to all bodies of elders and traveling overseers — the men who run Witness congregations — dated August 15, 2009, and titled "Reviewing Qualifications of Those Pursuing Higher Education," opens with this line:

Satan's world associates advanced secular education with success.

The letter goes on to ask elders directly:

Would an appointed brother continue to qualify for privileges in the congregation if he, his wife, or his children pursue higher education?

That meant a man could lose his standing in the congregation if he, his wife, or any of his children went to college — even after decades of failed end-times predictions. The question remained in the Elders Handbook, under its own heading, "He or a member of his household pursues higher education," all the way through the 2023 edition. It only disappeared in the September 2025 edition.

Same Age Group, Same Year, Opposite Instructions

Even recently, the internal message hasn't changed. The January 2022 study edition of the Watchtower, in a section called "Choose the Best Course in Life," lays out the choice facing young Witnesses this way:

On the one hand, school guidance counselors and unbelieving family members may urge them to pursue higher education in preparation for a prestigious career in the world. That path would likely consume a great deal of their time. On the other hand, parents and friends in the congregation may encourage young people to spend their life in Jehovah's service. Which should they pick?

The paragraph answers its own question: "Remember, the days are wicked and this system ruled by Satan will soon come to an end." Career advice, in this framing, comes from counselors and unbelievers. The better path comes from the congregation. The new whiteboard video uses the same two-sided setup — "you might get a lot of suggestions... no matter what others say" — but never tells the viewer which suggestion to reject. The Watchtower study edition does.

A little over a year before the whiteboard video went up, and about two months before the Elders Handbook still contained that question about a man's qualifications if his child attends college, the July 2025 Watchtower ran the experience of a young woman named Mickey:

When I graduated from school, my heart was leading me toward a career in the study of animals.

Mickey wanted to be a zoologist. The article continues:

Mature friends advised me to think very carefully about whether it was realistic for me to pursue the secular career I wanted and still reach my spiritual goals. They reminded me that this system will soon come to an end. On the other hand, in the new world, I will have an eternity to study as many animals as I like. So, I chose a short practical program.

Mickey is held up as the model for young Witnesses to follow. The accompanying study question asks readers why it's wise to meditate on the evidence that we're in the last days, using Mickey's experience as the illustration. On jw.org, the same organization tells the public that being diligent can help a teenager find a job to support a family. In the material studied at the Kingdom Hall, it tells kids to take the shorter, more practical program instead, because the end is too close for the career they actually want. Both messages went out to the same age group within roughly the same year.

Two Audiences, One Organization

The pattern isn't limited to this one video. In 2017, the Watchtower described Moses as a young man who could have set his goals on attaining prominence or economic security, adding: "What pressure he must have felt to do so from his Egyptian family, teachers and counselors." In that article, the teachers and counselors pushing economic security are the villains of the story. In the new whiteboard video, economic security is presented as the entire point — using much of the same language, aimed at an entirely different audience.

Even the video's closing line carries a shift. "It will be here sooner than you think" is a phrase Watchtower has used for 150 years, but for that entire span it referred to the end of the world. In the whiteboard video, on the public-facing site, it refers to a child becoming an adult. It's the same clock, pointed at a different alarm.

Why the Timing Might Not Be a Coincidence

Three things are true at the same time. First, Jehovah's Witnesses are losing their young people, at least in Western countries. Pew's research on American religion found that roughly two out of three people raised as Jehovah's Witnesses no longer identify with the religion as adults — the worst retention rate of any major religion in that study.

Second, Watchtower has relaxed a long list of rules in the same period: men can now have beards, the dress code has loosened so ties, suit coats, skirts and dresses are no longer required, the pioneer ministry's hour requirements have been reduced, shunning has been nominally softened at the edges, and, as noted above, the college question was dropped from the Elders Handbook in 2025. Every one of those changes loosens a restriction that would naturally push young people away.

Third, governments have been scrutinizing the religion more closely. Norway stripped the organization of its state registration for two years over its practice of shunning children, and although Watchtower won that case at Norway's Supreme Court this year by a vote of 3 to 2, the state argued all the way to the top court that shunning baptized minors amounts to psychological violence — and two of the five justices agreed. In Britain, the organization's charitable status has become entangled in a fight over mandatory reporting of child abuse, a practice that Australia's Royal Commission found frequently doesn't happen at all.

Set against that backdrop, an organization with a 50-year paper trail of telling minors not to plan for a future has reason to want that paper trail to stop growing — and to have something else on the record to point to instead. The whiteboard video doesn't have to convince anyone of anything to serve that purpose. It just has to exist: something a Witness teenager or their parents can show a school counselor pushing college applications, and something that can be pointed to in court. The internal culture doesn't need to change for the public messaging to change — it only needs to stop being written down where outsiders, or judges, can read it.

What Happens If They're Wrong

The 1969 Awake! article never asked what happens if the prediction fails and a young reader ends up 40, 50, 60, or 70 years old still living in this system of things. The Mickey article doesn't ask that question either. But the answer is already known, because it has already happened to generations of Witness families who gave up an education and a career on the promise that they wouldn't need one. By one count, Watchtower's predictions about the end of the world have failed more than 30 times over the past 150 years. The eternity to study the animals hasn't started yet.