How Does an Optimist Read the Newspaper?Or: How Should He Read It?

How Does an Optimist Read the Newspaper?

Or: How Should He Read It?

2 December 2025

An optimist sees life through a positive lens and believes in a good outcome, even in difficult situations. Setbacks are viewed as temporary obstacles or opportunities to learn. Where a pessimist sees the glass as half empty, the optimist notes that at least it’s still half full.

Positive outlook: an optimist approaches the future with hope and confidence.

Setbacks: obstacles are challenges that can be overcome.

Action-oriented: because they believe things will work out, optimists are quick to act.

Faith in success: they trust that tomorrow can be better than today.

But what happens when an optimist opens the newspaper?Take the Antilliaans Dagblad of 2 December 2025. Skimming the headlines:

• OM silent on CGA investigation

• Recovery period for Silvania

• First State Visit in 47 years — the Dutch King visits Suriname

• Pisas government hands out funds; subsidies €72 million above budget

• Cooper ‘upset’ with Cft

• Dispute over reference to OM investigation into Gaming Authority

• Tax office not fire-safe

• Maduro given one week to leave Venezuela

• CMC solution to be finalized as soon as possible

• Opinion: Elderly in poverty

• Eviction of tour company prevented

At that point, I’ve had enough. They say good news isn’t news because it doesn’t sell. So perhaps an optimist shouldn’t read the newspaper at all?

And then there’s that state visit. The real story is that Suriname — descendants of enslaved people, or slaves, or formerly enslaved… terminology is always a debate — has forgiven the King. Two years ago, he asked forgiveness for the Netherlands’ role in slavery. Now there are rituals, and some €66 million has been pledged. A new Dutch cabinet may decide whether more is appropriate. But that is not the point. What matters is that both sides say they can continue the healing process.

An optimist would have expected this on the front page.

On Curaçao, we seem to have forgotten that we also demanded apologies — and received them. As I said from the beginning, you must accept apologies and grant forgiveness. Instead, we have spent years investigating who did what — church, state, institutions. There’s nothing wrong with research, but healing also requires looking forward.

One of my best friends is an incurable optimist. He hasn’t read a newspaper in years, not even when he held a top position where reading the news was supposedly essential. He always told me:

“Miguel, you’ll tell me what I need to know.”

It’s not ignorance that is bliss. It’s a filter. Someone who weighs, selects, and doses the information.

Maybe that’s how an optimist should read the newspaper — through someone who makes the bad news digestible, and doesn’t let the good news drown.

Miguel Goede