I was only 19 when I got a taste of brutal state power. I was studying International Politics in London when my father, Can Dündar, was arrested for his journalism as editor in chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet over his reporting on the covert, illegal arms transfer of the intelligence service to radical rebels in Syria. From this simple piece of accurate news, they were seeking two life sentences in prison for him, previously the death penalty. He was detained on charges of treason, espionage and attempting to overthrow the state, and we as a family were up against a corrupt judiciary under pressure from political power, as well as the machinery of propaganda in the country with countless media networks spreading outrageous lies about us. The case was clearly intended to make an example of him, to create a chilling effect so others reporting to uncover illegalities or corruption would think twice before doing so.

As a 20-year-old, it would've been incredibly difficult to not feel small, broken and hopeless, if it wasn't for the scores of people stepping up to show solidarity with us, locally and internationally. From the first day of his trial, his colleagues at the newspaper, his readers over the last 30 years, civil society actors, lawyers and more good-hearted people gathered en masse to show their support and decry the injustice against him.

It empowered us to stand firm and for him to defend his case for journalism, for telling the truth. Veteran journalist Mete Akyol, 81 years old, stepped up one day, bringing a simple wooden chair with him to sit in front of the titanic prison walls, starting "the hope vigil". He said someone else should take over to keep watch every day. Scores of people and organizations came every day to participate in a symbolic sit-in protest.

The same was true internationally. My father was inundated with letters from all over the world in his prison cell. People I had never heard of, organizations like PEN and RSF that I admired for their work to defend human rights, came rushing to help, offering suggestions and strategies to cope and push back, inviting us to countless events and initiatives to speak and gather support, attending and observing trials for due process, organizing campaigns and diplomatic means to secure his freedom. After 92 days, which felt like an eternity not knowing when I would see Dad again, the solidarity and his uncompromising stance worked and he was released, with a 12-2 constitutional decision that what he did was journalism, not espionage. People cared; we were not alone.

The vast network of human care that formed meant the world to me, keeping me from total despair. It showed me how solidarity helped improve our lives and sense of hope, fortified our resilience, which is the key ingredient to sustaining such uphill struggles. I witnessed first-hand how solidarity works and holds antidotes for many like us.

Shortly after his release, while there were still over 40 journalists imprisoned in Turkey, I was invited to Oslo by PEN Norway to speak about his case. I recently found the text of that speech from May 4, 2016, given at a demonstration in front of Parliament for prosecuted Turkish journalists.

I was 20 years old and my speech was titled “In hopeful wishes for a common future.” It starts with the lines, “I was born into the possibility of a new world. I am one among a generation that today has the means to be informed of his fellow people everywhere. Our perception is global, yet I am saddened to see our perceptual walls reaching higher, we are mistaken to think that we are immune to each other's sorrow."

And ends with: "We are not free in a narrow consciousness and a bright future ultimately calls for common care."

That's when I joined PEN as an intern. I was the youngest person in the office. I immediately got to work exploring possible campaigns for other prosecuted journalists in Turkey. I was amazed at the scale of global pressures and the pushback mobilized from this international office with little at hand every day. Regional coordinators and our centers researched and vehemently assisted cases at risk from all parts of the world, trying to organize solidarity between various actors against some of the harshest conditions writers face.

I started learning fast, completely unaware that shortly after, a gunman's assault on my father's life outside a courthouse would change our lives completely. I was worried about an attack on him, like those so many of his colleagues and mentors in the country experienced historically. Staring down the barrel of a gun shook us all and Mom's response was the most heroic and symbolically apt, as she jumped on the gunman in seconds, trying to tackle him and keep him from shooting my dad. That sheer, almost senseless courage she displayed, the shield she formed out of herself was astonishing, but not rare. It was easy to see how, in a way, she had done that all her life, and just how many people do that daily for each other purely out of love and care, to watch each other's back. I never thought I would be unable to return to my home and country, but it happened, as Dad decided to leave Turkey in fear of his safety, his colleagues at the newspaper were arrested and Mom's passport was taken illegally due to "national security." All of a sudden, our family was split between three countries, unable to see each other for three years until Mom used her motherly right and made the decision to escape. So, at age 23, having committed no crime, I too became a refugee.

It was a difficult process to suddenly lose touch with almost everyone and everything I had at that point, my country, my community, my family... It resonated with the feelings of loss experienced more generally around the world. It was a trigger that propelled me into seeking to find deeper reasons to keep going, constructive, creative solutions to find remedies. PEN gifted me a sense of purpose and meaning which was healing. First, I wanted to connect with my peers whom I couldn't physically travel to meet, and İlkyaz was the first project I developed. With the double meaning of First Writing and Early Spring, it was created in response to the recognition that Turkey has become very polarized. Especially young people and writers couldn't find avenues to connect and share stories beyond political and ideological lines. We created an online platform for writers under 35, with support from PEN International and its Norwegian and Turkish chapters. No essays or political articles, only poetry, short stories and fiction. In a country with a heavy crackdown on free expression, the platform managed to avoid any prosecution or pro-government media attacks, bringing together over 300 young writers from all sorts of backgrounds. The more submissions we read, sometimes reaching over 1,000, the more we came to see how much all our emotional worlds and subconscious feelings were entangled and synchronized. How much sorrow, despair, heartbreak and depression had accumulated among young people of all ideologies across the country, how you could clearly see a yearning for a sense of belonging, hands reaching out in words for others near and far to hear and heed them.

Creative Witnesses was another project, in which we galvanized artists to create works inspired by the words of those in prison. It connected and moved both sides involved and yet again, it was proven that walls can be surmounted, enforced distances can be bridged. A few years later, our new president Burhan Sönmez and Hanna Trevarthen from English PEN alerted me to a concept used back when PEN was founded a hundred years ago. It was called Tomorrow Club, and our founder Catherine Amy Dawson Scott had created it to support young writers, before it transformed into the global network operating in over 120 countries that is PEN today. It was as if the dream found the perfect moment to be rekindled, just as we were trying to work out how the example of İlkyaz and many other youth projects across our organization could be united and upscaled into a global movement for young people under the banners of universal values that the PEN Charter lays out.

In light of this centenary sign, as youth engagement coordinator at PEN I embarked on forming a new global network for young writers to connect. At our Congress in Uppsala organized by PEN Sweden, we held workshops with representatives from various countries, discussing what kinds of solutions can be offered to the problems we are facing. During this time I learned that not only our emotional worlds but also our biggest practical problems were shared across borders. From climate breakdown to censorship, from wealth inequality to armed conflict, from deepening divisions to corruption, our biggest issues were increasingly shared. Yet our responses felt disconnected somehow, drifting apart from each other in arguments over ideology, identity, theories and admonishing all other viewpoints than our own within our own bubbles or echo chambers.

There was a study in Turkey that showed how people born in the ‘90s and ‘70s differed significantly in their outlook on the world vis-à-vis their own lives. While the older generation mostly saw their own fate intrinsically tied to the well-being of the world, the younger, more recent generation seemed to be of the view that they'll be fine, but the world was definitely headed for the worst. This decoupling of one's own fate from that of his or her community pointed to the hyper-individualism spread across society. It was clear to me that we as young people had to reconcile this well-being of the self with our wider community if we were to stand a chance against the enormity of the challenges rising up in the future.

The oversaturation of junk information online exacerbates isolation and “brain rot”— the word of 2024, per the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary. A state of intellectual decline driven by excessive consumption of trivial content. It speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, how we use our free time. “It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.”

Young people, in particular, suffer as isolation and despair leads to polarization and radicalization. Real communities, online and offline, are vital in counteracting division and fostering collaboration. To remedy the blinkered brain rot and the destabilizing doom scrolling we go through every day, we must see the broader, birds-eye view of what is happening to our peers and societies and how they are coping with it.

While the problems we face differ by background, location, and conditions, our emotional responses—anxiety, fear, hope, and a longing for peace—are shared. These emotions are essential to human nature, transcending ideological, social, and economic divides. However, moneyed interests, from autocratic governments to tech giants, manipulate these shared emotions for profit and control, spreading lies and fostering division. When truth erodes, trust vanishes, leaving us without a shared reality.

I was convinced that the solidarity I experienced could be passed on to others. We needed to focus on effecting change on some of the fundamental issues and problems we’re all facing before going back to arguing about less urgent differences between us. We needed to hear from each other across geographical and ideological divides, as we know little of how our peers live and what they feel, let alone those who live near us with different opinions. Centers in 42 countries supported this new Tomorrow Club initiative in Sweden, which jumped up to over 80 countries at our most recent Congress in Oxford, as a Young Writers Committee was founded at PEN International. Bright young people started emerging to join the effort from all corners of the world as we finally had a space to organize. History had, at last, met the present moment to show the way, bringing emerging faces to carry our centenary history into the future.

Learning of shared issues through the perspectives of peers, not ideological bite-size bits of news, can make us realize the similarities and differences that exist in our experiences and work on incorporating them into our own world view and communities.

Such is the dreaming of Tomorrow Club and the Young Writers Committee, a place where young storytellers and community leaders can get together to share stories and strategies of how they cope with the brain rot and the problems of the world today. To connect and coagulate inspiration and hope, derive courage from each other and “do something,” however small, for their local and wider global community, if only by supporting one unfairly prosecuted peer. One life is a world of its own after all.

It's still excruciating being forced to watch friends and family gradually fade at a distance as the pain stretches over years. My dearest grandfather passed away recently, I had waited 8 years with the hope of seeing him again and we were forced to watch his funeral on FaceTime. But in my darkest moments, I found myself consoled by being part of a big community, a local and global family of friends who feel for and stand by me. I doubt there’s a better remedy.