How is the future constituted as an object of knowledge, activity, and concern in the present? I take up this question in contemporary Greece, where long-term processes of European integration and more recent experiences of austerity have rendered the economy a principal frame for thinking about and acting on the future. Drawing on thirty months of ethnographic study that took me from economists running macroeconomic models and policy makers devising taxation schemes to families planning household budgets and retirees worrying about their pensions, I show how the diverse ways in which Greeks use the economy to think about and act on the future critically shape their understandings of the economy and experiences of the future in the present. Moreover, in conversation with scholarship on nation making in Greece and on the emergence of the concept of the economy, I offer an account of a nation and an economy fundamentally formed through their relationships with the future.