Last week, roughly 50 people showed up. This Monday, the group heads to Montara for a 4.7-mile loop with nearly 1,000 feet of elevation gain and Pacific Ocean views that, at the very least, remind you the world is bigger than your LinkedIn inbox.

On one hand, this is genuinely great. People navigating layoffs — and let's be honest, the Bay Area tech sector has been hemorrhaging jobs for over a year now — finding community instead of spiraling alone in their apartments is exactly the kind of grassroots, no-government-needed initiative we love to see. No city program. No grant funding. No bureaucratic overhead. Just people helping people lace up their boots and get outside.

As one Bay Area resident put it perfectly: "I both love and hate that the group keeps growing. Love seeing my neighbors get together and supporting each other like this, but hate that this job market is so terrible right now."

That tension is the whole story, isn't it? The group's success is a barometer of economic pain. Every new hiker represents another severance package, another team dissolved, another round of layoffs dressed up in corporate euphemisms about "right-sizing."

San Francisco spent the boom years taxing and regulating businesses into planning their exits. Sacramento piled on with employment mandates that made hiring feel like a legal liability. And now we have a Monday morning hiking club that keeps getting bigger — not because trail running went viral, but because the job market is genuinely broken.

We're not here to be doomers about it. The (un)PTO crew is doing something admirable — building real human connection without waiting for a government program or a wellness app subscription. That spirit of self-reliance is something this city could use a lot more of.

But let's not mistake a beautiful coping mechanism for a solution. The best thing that could happen to this hiking group is that it shrinks.